FDIC, My Ass!

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 assumed there's an actual FDIC fund in need of bolstering.

We were wrong. As a former FDIC chairman, Bill Isaac, points out, 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.

All of you feeling comfortable that the FDIC "insures" your bank account for up to $100,000 may want to ask, where will the government get the cash when no one will buy government debt anymore? Guess what. . . . . . they won't. Many of us may find ourselves destitute.

-Hal Turner

Okay, tell me again how a Chicago street nigger who has never even completed a single legislative term, and who has never had anything to do whatsoever with business, finance, or the economy, is going to fix all this? I keep listening to the Democrats for some hint as to what, exactly, the Baby-Shit Brown Messiah is going to actually DO about this, and all I hear is "booga booga booga."

-HAC