Quote Originally Posted by chitown
Does it cost the bank to be FDIC insured?
Yes they have to pay for it.

At the moment, due to the sheer volume of banks in America collapsing, the FDIC are asking all banks to pay their premiums between 3 and 5 years in advance. This is so the advanced cash can be used to pay up insured customers of all these small banks that are failing at the rate of about 2 per week.

The FDIC has NO WAY of paying everybody who has money in banks their money back in the event of systemic failure. They don't have enough money, didn't have enough money before all of these problems started and will never have enough money in the future.

This from wiki which I belive to be correct:

"The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation announced that the insurance fund that covers more than $4.5 trillion in deposits had a negative balance of $8.2 billion as of the end of the third quarter 2009"

FDIC are out of cash, bankrupt. Caputt.