Is Your Bank Healthy?

The situation keeps getting scarier and scarier……

I just happened upon an official FDIC Failed Bank page with links to info that may be of help to any affected depositors.

Twelve have failed so far this year. (That doesn’t include the latest humongous quagmires: Lehman Bros since they declared bankruptcy rather than being seized, Merrill Lynch since the Feds arranged for Bank of America to buy them out, or AIG since it’s an insurance company.)

That evil Reptile Phil Gramm — the one who called US “whiners”! :-P — must be laughing his derrière off since he’s the one who obliterated Glass-Steagall (late in the Clinton administration), the rule that kept private commercial banks, investment banks, speculators et al. from commingling, taking the kind of risks and doing the kind of damage that they’ve done to each other and to far more innocent others.

Free trade + deregulation = crooks run amok. Quite a fine system we have… well… HAD going here: hire on as a manager, run the company’s worth into the ground for a year or three, finally get the ax, and fly off in your Gulfstream with a $multimil golden parachute. (“Go ahead and fire my ass — I’ve got $200 million in the bank, anyway, so who cares?!! HAHAHAHA!!!” ::::pththt::::)

The thieves should be IN JAIL for fraud, embezzlement, and whatever else the SEC and other agencies/prosecutors can come up with.

But I digress……

You can see how your bank or credit union is doing at Bankrate.com.

Their system assigns a “Safe & Sound CAEL” (capitalization, asset quality, earnings and liquidity) rating to each institution, along with a corresponding star rating (1=superior, 5=lowest).

Hope nobody gets bad news!

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