Breaking The Bank: FDIC is low on cash and may need a bailout

Taxpayers beware: now the FDIC is low on cash and may need a bailout

First it was $100 billion, then $200 billion, $500 billion, and now it's $1 trillion or more. As estimates of the cost mounted for the bailout of the savings and loan industry, a taxpayer's only consolation was that at least commercial banks were safe and sound. Or were they? The way things are going, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, which insures commercial bank deposits, may have to be renamed the Future Disaster Inevitable Corporation. In grim testimony before the House Banking Committee last week, Comptroller General Charles Bowsher warned, "Not since it was born in the Great Depression has the federal...

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