Head of FDIC rips "too-big-to-fail" policy apart

[ck4829]

Sheila Bair, chairman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. and a lifelong Republican, boarded Air Force One for the first time in February. Neither President George H.W. Bush nor his son, President George W. Bush, had invited her on the world’s most famous jet in the five years she worked for them. It was a Democratic president, Barack Obama, who asked her to fly to Washington after the two had unveiled his administration’s foreclosure relief plan in Mesa, Arizona.

“Sheila, come on back. I want to talk to you,” Obama told Bair, who was seated in the plane’s conference room. He then escorted her into his airborne Oval Office for their first private meeting, where they discussed the government’s role in alleviating the worst financial crisis since the 1930s.

“It was great,” Bair says of her meeting with the president. “He’s got an agenda which we share. Banks are a means to an end. You stabilize the banks to support the economy. But you don’t stabilize the banks for the sake of stabilizing the banks.”

After being left out of big decisions by Bush administration officials, such as the push last year for the $700 billion bank bailout, Bair, 55, has become one of the most powerful policy makers in Washington. Driven by a combination of circumstances and her own candor, Bair has presided over the biggest expansion of the FDIC’s authority since its founding in 1933 to insure bank deposits.

...

Under Bair, the normally invisible agency was the prime mover behind Obama’s $75 billion program to curb foreclosures. Last year, the FDIC became the go-to agency to insure hundreds of billions in bank debt to boost liquidity, and it’s currently spearheading half of the initiative to encourage investors to buy up to $1 trillion in troubled assets.

The FDIC head isn’t done expanding her influence over Wall Street. An opponent of the “too-big-to-fail” policy for firms like Citigroup Inc., Bair is lobbying Congress to give the FDIC authority to wind down bank and thrift holding companies -- a move she says is necessary to protect taxpayers. And she wants lawmakers to include the agency in a systemic risk council to prevent future financial shocks.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/bloomberg/aqvszsak7rke

Too big to fail? Too big to exist is more like it.

[PM Martin]

1. Will these monsters such as Citigroup be taken

into government hands and broken up then?

[baldguy]

2. ..

[PM Martin]

4. What is in that picture?

[surrealAmerican]

3. Too big to fail really DOES mean too big to exist.

This is part of the reason for anti-trust laws. We need to apply these to the "financial sector".