More reasons I’m worried about banks

I knew it was possible, but I never dreamed the FDIC would actually come out and admit how overwhelmed they are by the current financial crisis.

Bloomberg – FDIC’s Bair Says Insurance Fund Could Be Insolvent This Year

Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. Chairman Sheila Bair said the deposit insurance fund could dry up amid a surge in bank failures, as she responded to an industry outcry against new fees approved by the agency.

“Without these assessments, the deposit insurance fund could become insolvent this year,” Bair wrote in a March 2 letter to the industry. U.S. community banks plan to flood the FDIC with about 5,000 letters in protest of the fees, according to a trade group.

“A large number” of bank failures may occur through 2010 because of “rapidly deteriorating economic conditions,” Bair said in the letter. “Without substantial amounts of additional assessment revenue in the near future, current projections indicate that the fund balance will approach zero or even become negative.”

The FDIC last week approved a one-time “emergency” fee and other assessment increases on the industry to rebuild a fund to repay customers for deposits of as much as $250,000 when a bank fails. The fees, opposed by the industry, may generate $27 billion this year after the fund fell to $18.9 billion in the fourth quarter from $34.6 billion in the previous period, the FDIC said. The fund was drained by 25 bank failures last year.

Smaller banks are outraged over the one-time fee, which could wipe out 50 percent to 100 percent of a bank’s 2009 earnings, Camden Fine, president of the Independent Community Bankers of America, said yesterday in a telephone interview.

She’s telling the American public that their FDIC-insured bank accounts are backed by an agency that may be insolvent this year. Can you say “bank runs”?

Me, I think the FDIC is an eyedropper trying to extinguish a forest fire. They have a few billion dollars in holdings to backstop trillions of dollars in deposits. The only reason the FDIC isn’t completely irrelevant is because the banks are being backstopped by the TARP bailout and separately by the Federal Reserve, which has committed several trillion dollars to guarantee loans.

Want some real banking doom and gloom? There are links from my FDIC and banking file:

Mish: You know the banking system is unsound when…

23. FDIC Chairman Sheila Bair said the FDIC is looking for ways to shore up its depleted deposit fund, including charging higher premiums on riskier brokered deposits.

24. There is roughly $6.84 Trillion in bank deposits. $2.60 Trillion of that is uninsured. There is only $53 billion in FDIC insurance to cover $6.84 Trillion in bank deposits. Indymac will eat up roughly $8 billion of that.

25. Of the $6.84 Trillion in bank deposits, the total cash on hand at banks is a mere $273.7 Billion. Where is the rest of the loot? The answer is in off balance sheet SIVs, imploding commercial real estate deals, Alt-A liar loans, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac bonds, toggle bonds where debt is amazingly paid back with more debt, and all sorts of other silly (and arguably fraudulent) financial wizardry schemes that have bank and brokerage firms leveraged at 30-1 or more. Those loans cannot be paid back.

What cannot be paid back will be defaulted on. If you did not know it before, you do now. The entire US banking system is insolvent.

iTulip: Major US banks worse than Japan’s zombies?

iTulip: What do you make of the extraordinary levels of bank reserves that the Federal Reserve is pumping into the Federal Reserve System, now at more than 600% higher than November 2007 levels?

Dr. B: Think of the commercial banks that take loans from the Federal Reserve banking system as a person and the money that flows through them as the blood in a person’s body. Now think of that person as injured. When he suffers a severe injury and loses blood, the Fed gives him an emergency money transfusion. You can see in your chart below the money transfusions in late 1999 just before the end of the year, due to the Y2K scare — false, as it turns out — and in 2001 after 9/11. Some believe that the withdrawal of reserves in mid 2000 caused the market decline that led to the recession of 2001.

Dr. B: After the injury is operated on and healed and the patient is producing his own money again, the money that was added earlier by the Fed’s transfusion is drained back out. As you can see from your chart above, the transfusions usually take two to six months and typically six months or so after the crisis is over are gradually withdrawn over a period of several months to return total money in the system to pre-crisis levels.”

iTulip: That makes sense. But why has the Fed this time had to continue to transfuse money? Why are the transfusions so huge and why do the transfusions seem to not be working? Is he still bleeding and the money is pouring through the system? If you try to compare previous expansions with this one on the same chart on the same scale, the differences are quite stark.

Dr. B: My theory is, and I admit not everyone will agree with it, is this: the patient is dead.

iTulip: Interesting. That does not bode well for the efficacy of future transfusions.

Dr. B: No it does not. They can keep the intravenous tube hooked up to a pint bottle or a 100 gallon drum of blood but it doesn’t matter if the blood is not circulating through the patient so he can take it in.

I picked a bad year to give up alcohol for Lent.