FDIC Insurance Fund: It Doesn’t Actually Exist

[efoods]When FDIC head Shelia Bair says her agency might have to bolster the FDIC’s insurance fund with Treasury borrowings to pay for the new spate of bank failures, a lot of us, this 40-year banking veteran included, assumed there’s an actual FDIC fund in need of bolstering.

We were wrong. As a former FDIC chairman, Bill Isaac, points out here, the FDIC Insurance Fund is an accounting fiction. It takes in premiums from banks, then turns those premiums over to the Treasury, which adds the money to the government’s general coffers for “spending . . . on missiles, school lunches, water projects, and the like.”

The insurance premiums aren’t really premiums at all, therefore. They’re a tax by another name.

Actually, it’s worse than that. The FDIC, persisting in the myth that its fund really is an insurance pool, now proposes to raise the “premiums” it charges banks to make up for the “fund’s” coming shortfall. The financially weakest banks will be hit with the biggest tax hikes.

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