Banner Year For Banking Failures With Many More Coming

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A Banner Year for Bank Failures
Karen De Coster

While the government spent zillions trying to prop up its swine flu propaganda campaign in order to grab unprecedented new powers by putting the populace under the spell of a doomsday crisis, duplicitous public officials who paint catastrophic landscapes with pink ribbons and teddy bears are obscuring the real calamities. The blighted landscape before us has been glossed over with a swarm of lies and appeasements. What's coming down the pike is a crush of oncoming bank failures.

One notable item appeared recently on Money & Markets, courtesy of Martin D. Weiss, Ph.D.: "200 Bank Failures Expected in 2010." Some of the views of Martin Weiss are problematic in many ways, but he has been learning bits and pieces from the Austrian school of economics. For instance, in the span of a few months, he went from being a rabid deflationist to an overt inflationist. Gary North has written about this. Here's Weiss in his latest piece on bank failures:

Washington has so thoroughly botched its supervision of the banking industry that 200 banks are likely to fail this year - easily surpassing last year's 140 bank failures ... inevitably involving the greatest bank losses in history ... and already costing the FDIC ten times more than the great S&L and banking crisis of the 1980s did.

Weiss points to the recent testimony of FDIC Chairwoman Sheila Bair (he says "Blair," but that's an easy-to-make typo). Make no mistake - Bair is a raging statist and has been selling a pack of lies to the public since her appointment to the FDIC. Her solutions for current financial crises are always centered on the necessity of more federally mandated reforms. If you are an advocate of the free market, don't read the portion of Bair's testimony that attempts to explain, "Why market discipline failed" - it will make you bonkers. On the contrary, she did blast Greenspan for causing the housing bubble and she condemned Washington for enabling Wall Street's shadow banking system. In his article, Weiss has this to say about the magnitude of the current banking meltdown:

Worse than the 1980s:

If you're among those who think today's banking crisis isn't nearly as bad as the great S&L and banking crisis of the 1980s, think again. The average bank failing today is six times larger than it was back then, producing far greater losses. Moreover, each bank failure is costing the FDIC about TEN times more than it did in the 1980s crisis, according to the Meridian Group of Seattle. As a result ...
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