Sheila Bair

The Strange Campaign Against Sheila Bair And The FDIC

Moe Tkacik | April 7, 2009, 6:12PM

FDIC Chairman Sheila Bair has been under attack recently in various quarters of the crisis blogosphere in a campaign that culminated this morning in a critical New York Times column today by Andrew Ross "Let Those AIG 'Brainiacs' Keep Their Bonuses" Sorkin, who takes issue with her agency's agreement to guarantee all the non-recourse loans Treasury's toxic asset buyout plan is promising private investors to leverage their bets.

So how much does the F.D.I.C. think it might lose?

"We project no losses," Sheila Bair, the chairwoman, told me in an interview. Zero? Really? "Our accountants have signed off on no net losses," she said. (Well, that's one way to stay under the borrowing cap.)

By this logic, though, the F.D.I.C. appears to have determined it can lend an unlimited amount of money to anyone so long as it believes, at least at the moment, that it won't lose any money.

Here's the F.D.I.C.'s explanation: It says it plans to carefully vet every loan that gets made and it will receive fees and collateral in exchange. And then there's the safety net: If it loses money from insuring those investments, it will assess the financial industry a fee to pay the agency back.

So what's the problem here? It's not as if Bair is afraid to project a loss for her agency. The biggest concern about the plan is that it will enrich Wall Street at the expense of real prices -- especially if banks use the funds to bid up each other's bad loans as envisioned by this blogger we read on Felix Salmon's blog:

Read more »

PERMALINK | COMMENTS (2) | RECOMMEND RECOMMEND (3)
Topics: Sheila Bair