Unintended TARP Victims

[Skull Pilot]

It seems that in it's rush to save us all from certain annihilation the brain trust that is the federal government can add more responsible businesses and citizens to their shakedown list.

Even though many banks have come through the housing bubble in excellent financial shape with negligible rises in foreclosures due to sound lending practices, these same fiscally responsible institutions are seeing a quadrupling of their FDIC insurance premiums for no other reason that the government needs cash to continue the bail out of irresponsible banks and businesses.

Obama's First 100 Days - Wall Street Journal

Executives at Alpine are frustrated that the cost of their FDIC insurance is increasing to close to $1 million this year from $250,000 last year, to help replenish the government funds that are being used to guarantee deposits in failed banks.

Alpine Bank, with 14 full-service branches, is the Rockford area’s leading mortgage lender. It services about $660 million in mortgage loans, out of a total portfolio of just under $1 billion. But despite Rockford’s climbing unemployment rate, which has reached 12.5%, the bank’s default and past-due rate on its 7,200 mortgage loans has risen only slightly, to less than 0.3%. That’s much less trouble than lenders are experiencing nationwide.

How many more banks like Alpine, you know good solid local banks that actually serve their communities, are getting squeezed by the government?

And the sad part is that the government will keep squeezing until the only banks left are the ones that they bailed out and now own.

Tell me how that is "good for America"?

 

[RodISHI]

I suppose the small banks are now in the same situation many small businesses have already faced when larger corporate businesses were preferred over them.

I can't say this is a good thing at the moment Skull but like any else where people have stood for justice and equality and the others did not stand with them, they were next in line for the hachet job.

Comes down to that old saying, "we are all in this together."

 

[Kevin_Kennedy]

This sets a precedent that it's better to fail than it is to succeed in the government's eyes. The government needs to wise up.

 

[RodISHI]

Looks like the little guy is paying for what the few gambled on.

This quote is from a running article.
What Cooked the World's Economy?

But it wasn't magic. It amounted to the return of the age-old scam called "bucket shops." Also sometimes known as "boiler rooms," bucket shops emerged after the Civil War. Usually, they were storefronts where people came to bet on stocks without owning them. Unlike their customers, the shops actually owned blocks of stock. If customers were betting that a stock would go up, the shops would sell it and the price would plunge; if bettors were bearish, the shops would buy. In this way, they cleaned out their customers. Frenetic bbanned bucket shops, and every other state soon followed.

In the mid-'90s, though, the credit-derivatives industry was hitting its stride and argued vehemently for exclusion from all state and federal anti-bucket-shop regulations. On the side of the industry were Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, and his deputy, Lawrence Summers. Holding the fort for the regulators was Brooksley Born, who headed the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC). The three financial titans ridiculed the virtually unknown and cloutless, but brilliant and prophetic Born, who warned that unrestricted derivatives trading would "threaten our regulated markets, or indeed, our economy, without any federal agency knowing about it."bucket-shop activity caused the Panic of 1907. By 1909, New York had Warren Buffett also weighed in against deregulation.