With respect to the Secretary, she's either being disingenuous or being deliberately obtuse with this statement:
> Any losses to the FDIC's deposit insurance fund due to the bank collapses will be recovered by a special assessment on banks, the FDIC has said. Yellen said it was "not obvious" that banks would pass those costs on to bank customers.
The banks are obviously going to pass the costs on to the consumer in the form of fees. Their shareholders will demand it. They won't call it a "replenish the insurance fund fee", they'll add more fees to using the ATM, or "penalties" for going under the minimum balance, or (my favorite) "overdraft" fees, as if the people who are over drafting can afford more of that.
> Yellen, speaking before a U.S. Senate subcommittee, said she believed it was "worthwhile" to look at changes to FDIC deposit insurance, but that increasing it beyond the current $250,000 limit was not being considered.
> When a bank failure "is deemed a systemic risk, which I think of as the risk of a contagious bank run, (we) are likely to invoke (a) systemic risk exception, which permits the FDIC to protect all deposits," Yellen said, adding the department will determine systemic risks on a case-by-case basis.
So the "experts" will sit in a smoke-filled back room and determine on a "case-by-case" basis whether or not to bail out (sorry, "backstop") the "too-big-to-fail" banks? In other words, "we've got the backs of JP Morgan and the like but the rest of you will have to appeal to our generosity".
Tonight on ‘Whose Treasury is it Anyway?’ where the rules are made up and the points don’t matter…
I don’t think we learned from last time that when you just abandon the established processes in economic times like this, people lose faith in the system. For many people, that faith has been absent for 15 years. What is the cost of that?
What's more revealing is how easy it is to maximize FDIC for large sums of money.
You can get 250k per account per institution. That also applies to joint accounts. If you have a spouse and two kids you can get 5 insured accounts per institution (one for you, your spouse, one with you and kid one, you and kid two, and you and your spouse) so that's effectively $1 million per institution.
Follow this up to 50 institutions and you suddenly have FDIC backing 50 million dollars.
Of course this process can be automated well beyond 50 institutions with CDARS.
Does this protect hundreds of millions? That's harder but possible. But it does protect clearly up to 10s if not $100+ million - you just need the spouse and kids or someone to have the joint accounts with.
> Any losses to the FDIC's deposit insurance fund due to the bank collapses will be recovered by a special assessment on banks, the FDIC has said. Yellen said it was "not obvious" that banks would pass those costs on to bank customers.
The banks are obviously going to pass the costs on to the consumer in the form of fees. Their shareholders will demand it. They won't call it a "replenish the insurance fund fee", they'll add more fees to using the ATM, or "penalties" for going under the minimum balance, or (my favorite) "overdraft" fees, as if the people who are over drafting can afford more of that.
> Yellen, speaking before a U.S. Senate subcommittee, said she believed it was "worthwhile" to look at changes to FDIC deposit insurance, but that increasing it beyond the current $250,000 limit was not being considered.
> When a bank failure "is deemed a systemic risk, which I think of as the risk of a contagious bank run, (we) are likely to invoke (a) systemic risk exception, which permits the FDIC to protect all deposits," Yellen said, adding the department will determine systemic risks on a case-by-case basis.
So the "experts" will sit in a smoke-filled back room and determine on a "case-by-case" basis whether or not to bail out (sorry, "backstop") the "too-big-to-fail" banks? In other words, "we've got the backs of JP Morgan and the like but the rest of you will have to appeal to our generosity".