Daily Archives: October 18, 2009

Who You Callin’ Broke?

from The Wash­ing­ton Times:

The reces­sion has so dev­as­tated the FDIC’s deposit insur­ance fund that the agency has had to take the unprece­dented step of requir­ing banks to pre­pay $45 bil­lion of insur­ance pre­mi­ums by the end of this year in order to replen­ish the FDIC’s cof­fers. The pre­mi­ums would cover the fourth quar­ter of this year and all of 2010, 2011 and 2012.

Is this like bor­row­ing against the equity of your house because hous­ing prices are guar­an­teed to always go up?

Or is this like your land­lord telling you he wants four years rent in advance because he’s going to do these great improvements?

Or is this what the IRS does with with­hold­ing, only even the IRS only takes one year?

What if the bank fails because it gave so much money to pre-pay its FDIC assess­ments and the FDIC uses the bank’s own money to take it over?

Or is this more like what Bon­nie and Clyde used to do?

Uh-oh.  Obama is get­ting seri­ous.  For awhile there he was just threat­en­ing blog­gers, Rush Lim­baugh, and Fox News.  Now he’s going up against the entire insur­ance industry.

And rather than pun­ish them him­self he’s call­ing out the big gun.

Oh, no!  Please don’t tell Dad Congress.

After all, Obama can sic the Jus­tice Depart­ment, the IRS, the Equal Employ­ment Oppor­tu­nity Com­mis­sion, and the Fed­eral Trade Com­mis­sion on them.

Con­gress can declare war.