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(Reuters) – The largest global banks on Tuesday expressed confidence they can be salvaged or dismantled without taxpayer bailouts if they became insolvent, as U.S. regulators released public portions of these banks’ “living wills”.

The documents, required by the 2010 Dodd-Frank financial reform law, are resolution plans that try to get rid of the idea that financial giants are too big or too complex to fail.

If regulators find that the resolution plans are not credible, they can force the banks to sell off business lines or restructure in other ways.

The public portions released on Tuesday were not detailed and are just a fraction of the hundreds of pages submitted confidentially to regulators.

But the banks aimed to make clear that the resolution plans will work, with no cost to taxpayers or great consequence to the financial system. Many institutions also mentioned how they had taken steps to bolster their capital or manage risk to avoid ever needing to use the plans.

“The Resolution Plan would not require extraordinary government support, and would not result in losses being borne by the US government,” JPMorgan Chase & Co said in its document, while also emphasizing its “fortress balance sheet”.

The eight other banks who submitted wills were Bank of America, Barclays, Citigroup, Credit Suisse, Deutsche Bank, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and UBS.

The Federal Reserve and Federal Deposit Insurance Corp released the plans without commenting on them.

Guggenheim Partners financial policy analyst Jaret Seiberg said the documents contained few shocks, and said his feeling is that regulators will not take an extreme approach with the resolution plans.

“Our initial review suggests there is little real risk that regulators could reject one of these plans,” Seiberg said in a note. “That is important because regulators could break up a financial firm that fails to submit a credible plan.”

The regulators plan to give feedback to the banks on the initial plans by September.

Other large banks will have until July and December of next year to hand in their plans, according to the FDIC. Eventually about 125 banks are expected to submit plans.

Congress called for the plans in Dodd-Frank to ease concerns that some banks are so big and interconnected that taxpayers will inevitably bail them out to avoid a threat to global markets.

The FDIC gained new powers in Dodd-Frank to use the plans to dismantle failing financial giants if the bankruptcy process would not work.

KEEP IT SIMPLE

Citigroup found a special reason to argue that its resolution planning would work: its wrenching experience in the 2007-2009 financial crisis.

To recover from the crisis, Citigroup separated businesses to be sold or gradually liquidated from those it is keeping as its “core” pursuits. The company said that process meant its “personnel would be well equipped to assist regulators” if the company had to be divided up into pieces to be sold or closed.

“Citi is today a fundamentally different institution than it was before the crisis: smaller, leaner, safer, sounder, and completely focused on our core mission,” it said in the summary of its resolution plan.

Throughout the 42-page document, Bank of America emphasizes steps it has taken in recent years to streamline the company, build capital and improve risk management.

“Bank of America has strengthened its risk culture as evidenced by improvements in consumer and commercial credit quality and decreases in market and counterparty risk,” it said.

Bank of America has lagged its rivals in recovering from the financial crisis, largely due to mortgage losses tied to its 2008 Countrywide Financial purchase.

Bert Ely, a banking consultant in Alexandria, Virginia, said he was skeptical that the overall process could work because there would likely be a lot of turmoil in the markets when the plans were needed, raising questions about who might buy any assets.

“The presumption of a one-off event is not realistically valid,” he said. “You can have one company blow itself up, but more often than not there are systemic problems.”

INTERNATIONAL FRAMEWORK

Some of the foreign banks outlined resolution strategies for both home and U.S.-based regulators.

Deutsche Bank imagined high levels of international cooperation, noting it could be dismantled “in an orderly manner with minimal systemic disruptions, and that any cross-border issues arising from financial, operational or other interconnections could be adequately addressed without significant difficulties,” it said.

Barclays said effective resolution plans are “an integral component of eradicating ‘too big to fail’ for the largest global financial institutions.”

It also noted how critical cooperation will be among international regulators.

Barclays submission, dated July 2012, was already out of date. It listed Marcus Agius as chairman and Robert Diamond as CEO. Both have resigned in response to a Libor interest rate rigging scandal.

(Reporting by Alexandra Alper in Washington; David Henry and Lauren Tara LaCapra in New York; and Rick Rothacker in Charlotte; Writing by Karey Wutkowski; Editing by Tim Dobbyn)