FDIC Is Broke, Taxpayers at Risk, Bair Muses: Jonathan Weil Share | Email | Print | A A A by Jonathan Weil http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601039&sid=aEKc7Yh8ogXw Sept. 24 (Bloomberg) -- The FDICâs insurance fund is going broke, and Sheila Bair is wondering aloud about how to replenish it. This means one thing for taxpayers: Watch your wallets. Bair, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp.âs chairman since 2006, says the agency has many options. One way to boost its coffers, now running low after a surge in bank failures, would be to charge banks higher premiums. It could make them pay future assessments in advance. Alternatively, the FDIC could borrow money from the banks it regulates. Or it could borrow from the Treasury, where it has a $500 billion line of credit. âThereâs a philosophical question about the Treasury credit line, whether that is there for losses that we know we will have, or whether itâs there for unexpected emergencies,â Bair said Sept. 18 at a Georgetown University conference in Washington. âThis is really a debate for Washington and for banks,â she added. Far be it from me to intrude on this closed-circuit conversation. The question Bair posed should be a no-brainer. Borrowing taxpayer money to bail out the FDIC should be an option of last resort reserved for unforeseen emergencies. That the agency would consider this now underscores how dire its financial condition has become. Whatever path it chooses, we shouldnât lose sight of this: The FDIC has been mismanaged, and its credibility as a regulator is in tatters. Its insurance fund wouldnât be in this position today if the agency had been run well. Flipping Out Bairâs comments last week reminded me of a year-old article by Bloomberg News reporter David Evans, who wrote that the FDIC soon could run out of money and might need a taxpayer bailout by the Treasury Department. Most revealing was the FDICâs reaction. It flipped out. The day the story ran, the agency released an open letter to Bloomberg from a spokesman, Andrew Gray. He said the piece âdoes a serious disservice to your organization and your readers by painting a skewed picture of the FDIC insurance fund.â Gray said âthe insurance fund is in a strong financial position to weather a significant upsurge in bank failuresâ and that he did not foresee âthat taxpayers may have to foot the bill for a âbailout.ââ He said the fund âis 100 percent industry backed,â and âour ability to raise premiums essentially means that the capital of the entire banking industry -- thatâs $1.3 trillion -- is available for support.â Tapping Capital If needed, he said, the FDIC could borrow from the Treasury, noting that the funds by law would have to âbe paid back from industry assessments.â He stressed the FDIC had done this only once. It happened in the early 1990s, and the money was repaid with interest in less than two years. Gray told me this week that he stands by his earlier remarks. His notion that the FDIC could tap the capital of the entire banking industry still baffles me. While hypothetically this might be true, I doubt all $1.3 trillion would be available in any practical sense. The FDIC said its insurance fundâs assets exceeded liabilities by $10.4 billion, a mere 0.22 percent of insured deposits, as of June 30. The liabilities included $32 billion of reserves the FDIC had set aside to cover bank failures that it believed were likely to occur during the next 12 months. As recently as March 31, 2008, the FDIC had earmarked just $583 million of reserves for future failures. This was after the rest of the financial world already knew we were in a crisis. By the end of 2008, it had boosted these reserves to $24 billion. Projected Losses The balance-sheet reserves donât capture all the insurance fundâs anticipated losses. In May, the FDIC said it was projecting $70 billion of losses during the next five years due to bank failures. The agency said it expects most of those collapses to occur in 2009 and 2010. The FDICâs problem is that it didnât collect enough revenue over the years to cover todayâs losses. The blame lies partly with Congress. Until the law was changed in 2006, the FDIC was barred from charging premiums to banks that it classified as well-capitalized and well-managed. Consequently, the vast majority of banks werenât paying anything for deposit insurance. Of course, we now know it means nothing when the FDIC or any other regulator labels a bank âwell-capitalized.â Most banks that failed during this crisis were considered well- capitalized just before their failure. After the law changed, the FDIC still didnât charge enough premiums. So far this year, 94 banks have been shut, the fastest pace in almost two decades. Hundreds of others are in trouble. The FDIC said 416 banks were on its âproblemâ list, a 15-year high, as of June 30. That was up from 305 three months earlier. Regardless of the lawâs requirements, if the FDIC starts tapping its credit line at the Treasury, there can be no assurance it would be able to pay back all the money through future assessments on banks. Thatâs why it should be reluctant to borrow from taxpayers now, even though the banking industry whines that it canât afford any short-term cost increases. At the rate itâs going, though, the FDIC may not have a choice much longer. Perhaps Bair and the FDIC someday might see fit to deliver a full account of how the agency managed to mess itself up this badly. The country deserves an explanation. To contact the writer of this column: Jonathan Weil in New York at jweil6@bloomberg.net Last Updated: September 23, 2009 21:00 EDT
Yep, your bank deposits are FDIC "insured". 250.000 USD through December 2013 according to Schwab : http://www.schwab.com/public/schwab/nn/legal_compliance/fdic_insurance.html So WHO is insuring FDIC ? Treasury ? LOL !
I'm not worried, she said a few weeks ago that everyones money was safe, really that's what Sheila Bair said.
Well, yeah. It's SAFE... in that nobody's going to steal it. (Who would steal Monopoly money?... it's worthless.)
Exactly. Taxpayers are going to bailout FDIC through Treasury, no matter what they say. Banks aren't paying FDIC fees in reality.
very scary. very very scary (tongue-in-cheek) of course no one in their right mind has much money denominated in Dollars or in the a U.S domicile.
i only recently realized that the extent of the devastation of the GD was because there was no bank depositors insurance the FDIC has raised the rates charged to banks at least once this year but like the levees surrounding New Orleans that couldn't cope with the high storm surge the FDIC insurance wasn't intended to save Every bank in the US, so i don't agree with Jonathan Weil's article the FDIC has previous experience with a 'storm of the century' - S&L crisis - "The savings and loan crisis of the 1980s and 1990s was the failure of 745 savings and loan associations. . . The ultimate cost of the crisis is estimated to have totaled around $160.1 billion, about $124.6 billion of which was directly paid for by the US governmentâthat is, the US taxpayer . . .": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Savings_and_loan_crisis 'The S&L Crisis: A Chrono-Bibliography': http://www.fdic.gov/bank/Historical/s&l/