This should worry you

Bloomberg.com reports FDIC insures all accounts up to $100,000 at its member banks, and it has never failed to honor a claim. The IndyMac debacle is taking a large bite out of FDIC reserves, and if scores of other banks fail in the year ahead, the fund will be depleted. Taxpayers will have to step in. The FDIC knows which banks are at risk; it has a watch list with 117 institutions. The agency won't disclose their names because doing so could cause depositors to panic and pull out all of their funds. It won't take many more failures before the FDIC itself runs out of money. The agency had $45.2 bln in its coffers as of June 30, far short of the $200 bln Whalen says it will need to pay claims by the end of next year. The U.S. Treasury will almost certainly come to the rescue. Emergency federal funding of the FDIC could swell the cost of government rescues of failed financial institutions to more than $400 bln -- not including the $700 bln general Wall Street bailout now under discussion in Congress. That number would be even higher if the government were on the hook for uninsured deposits -- which amount to $2.6 trillion, 37% of the total of $7 trillion held in the U.S. branches of all FDIC member banks... As recently as March, an internal FDIC memo estimated the cost to cover bank collapses in 2008 would be just $1 bln, dropping to $450 mln in 2009. It wasn't even close. The IndyMac failure alone, which happened four months after that memo was circulated, will cost the FDIC $8.9 bln -- and the bill for all 12 collapses will be about $11 bln, the FDIC says.