The Good Ship U.S.S. Bank Failure Keeps A Chipper Pace

With three more failures this week, each of which was a good sized bank ($400 million to $1 billion in assets), the FDIC further dug its hole. While The Sheila Bear may not cop to being broke for a while yet as she authorizes the FDIC to keep playing games like underestimating losses on failures by entering long-tail loss-sharing agreements and levying special assessments on its constituents, I cannot imagine there is a thinking person in the U.S. that has looked at the FDIC's own statistics and thought there is a chance in hell they do not tap the U.S. Treasury for emergency funding (is pre-authorized "emergency" funding really an emergency, or just an eventuality?).

Our bank death scoreboard for the July 1st, 2009 through September 30, 2010 period stands at:

39 down: 211 (minimum) to go

Everyone and their mother refers to the FDIC's published data on the size of its Deposit Insurance Fund (DIF) when discussing its size. For instance, in this paragraph from the 8/31/09 WSJ, we can see the DIF is $10.4 billion:

We're referring to the federal deposit insurance fund, which has been shrinking faster than reservoirs in the California drought. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. reported late last week that the fund that insures some $4.5 trillion in U.S. bank deposits fell to $10.4 billion at the end of June, as the list of failing banks continues to grow. The fund was $45.2 billion a year ago, when regulators told us all was well and there was no need to take precautions to shore up the fund.

What they fail to mention is that by the FDIC's on estimates, in the bank failures that happened in July and August alone, the FDIC self-reports that it lost $10.7 billion!!! Now, obviously it has continued to receive guarantee fees for its monoline-esque business and it continues to bring in premium. Those probably total $3 billion in the past two months. That means that the DIF has less than $3 billion remaining.

THE FDIC IS BROKE. As we noted last week:

Now, now, we know the US Treasury guarantees the DIF, so depositors need not fear, but hopefully this recognition of functional insolvency allows us to get past the ruse that the FDIC has fulfilled its duty of charging appropriate insurance premiums and providing capable regulatory oversight. In fact, the FDIC's has been an abject failure at these core functions. If the FDIC DIF were were an actual insurer, the FDIC Deposit Insurance Fund itself would have been taken over and killed by the government.

Keep that track record in mind when the FDIC "experts" espouse their opinions on the "solutions" to our current ills.

This is all happening in front of our very eyes and with another 300+ banks tee'd up to fail, if we assume the average failure costs $200 million (vs $274 million per failure since 6/30/09), the FDIC will burn through another $60 billion of capital between now and the end of 2010.

Happy days!

Luckily, our government shits out $50 billion like it ain't no thing these days. The Fed will continue its backdoor monetization as it attempts to inflate away our debt problem without anyone noticing via a variety of lightly masked helicopter drops (we'll address this another day as we can only put so much angst into one post). We're sure nobody will so much as blink an eye at this.

Nor will anyone talk about the fact that the FDIC continues to steal from the poor and give to the rich in absolute violation of its mandate with nearly each and every bank failure. This was yet another week in which every depositor, whether or not they had deposits in excess of $250,000, was fully preserved. THIS IS JUST AN ABSOLUTE ABDICATION OF RESPONSIBILITY AND FIDUCIARY DUTY! Tell me one other insurance company that volunfuckingtarily provides insurance to its customers for events that both parties agree were not actually covered by the policy.

Tell me one.

Half the time you cannot get a private insurer to pay for things that you thought were insured!

F!!!

F!!!

TILB hereby challenges anyone from the FDIC to justify why on fucking Earth they provide insurance to depositors that are over the $250,000 limit. LaJuan Williams-Dickerson, are you listening? And Lajuan Williams-Dickerson, don't you dare tell me that this is needed to keep the public calm; if that is the case and everyone agrees it is necessary (we do not agree, but assume everyone excluding us for the time being), then at least charge for the service provided (gasp!). This is not rocket science.

Lord willing we will see a series of congressional hearings that end this theft going forward.

In any case, on to this week's stats:

Red Jersey of Shame Leaderboard - California picks up one point:
Georgia 18, Illinois 13, California 9, Florida 6.

Weekly Failure Summary:

Bradford Bank, Baltimore, MD
Assets: $452mm, FDIC Losses: $97mm, Losses as a Percentage of Assets: 21.5%

Mainstreet Bank, Forest Lake, MN
Assets: $459mm, FDIC Losses: $95mm, Losses as a Percentage of Assets: 20.7%

Affinity Bank, Ventura, CA
Assets: $1000mm, FDIC Losses: $254mm, Losses as a Percentage of Assets: 25.4%

Straight Average Losses as a Percentage of Assets: 22.5%
Weighted Average Losses as a Percentage of Assets: 23.3%

Happy Happy, Joy Joy.