Word: moneyitis
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...months it had been clear that the FDIC, which maintains a fund to protect deposits when banks fail, would soon run out of money. By the FDIC's own revised estimate, the credit crisis, which has already claimed 95 banks this year, will cost the agency $100 billion. Half of that has already been spent. It's the other half the FDIC is having problems coming up with. As of the end of June, the FDIC had about $10 billion left in its insurance fund. That has put the FDIC in a tough spot. When a bank fails...
Normally, the FDIC would assess a special onetime fee to banks to raise the money it needs for its fund. But bank executives have been saying that any additional payments they have to make to the FDIC above their normal quarterly bill would force them to cut lending. Special assessments have to be recorded as a cost when they are paid to the FDIC, which reduce bank earnings and capital. It was a capital crunch that caused the financial crisis in the first place. (See pictures of the global financial crisis...
...FDIC's second option is to borrow money from the Treasury Department. This is well within the rules of the FDIC. The agency has a credit line with the Treasury to tap as much as $500 billion in emergency capital through the end of next year. But the FDIC is worried that if the agency, which has always been privately funded through bank assessments, borrowed money from the Treasury, it would look like a new bank bailout, eroding the sliver of confidence the public has regained in our nation's banking system in the past few months...
...another solution, which it says will simultaneously boost the fund and not hurt bank earnings or deplete lending. How is it possible that the FDIC's gain will not be a loss to the banking system? It's all thanks to an accounting quirk that allows companies to spend money on something but not actually tell their shareholders about the cost until the asset is gone. For you and me, it would be like shoplifting at the supermarket and then dropping off cash every time you decided to eat something. A can of beans might not cost you anything...
...does nothing to keep its fund officially out of the red. That's because the same accounting that allows banks to hide the costs will prevent the FDIC from marking up its own assets. Just as the banks get to add an asset to their balance sheet for the money they are prepaying, the FDIC has to book a liability for the money that it has received from the banks but is not actually entitled to yet. That liability will lower the balance of the FDIC's fund by the same amount that it is boosted by the prepayment. That...