hi it's Patti her shop marketplace the
fdic or federal deposit insurance
corporation is a lot like severus snape
maria's this is the best that I could do
I'm afraid you may remember that snape
was Harry Potter's potions teacher at
Hogwarts and a deeply misunderstood
fellow kind of like the FDIC which is
much maligned by a lot of the American
public there are those on the Left who
claim it's just a big corporate welfare
fund for big banks and those on the
right who say it's poorly managed and
could end up costing the taxpayer
billions of dollars now the FDIC though
like severus snape has got our best
interests at heart it's got a number of
roles which include regulating some
banks but its main job is to safeguard
our savings there we go and it does this
by acting as an insurance fund now it is
owned by the government but it's not
funded by the government it's kind of
much more like your health plan you know
where workers put a certain amount of
money into the plan every month then if
somebody gets sick the fund managers dip
into that pool of money and pay the
doctors in the same way banks pay money
into the FDIC and then if one of them
gets sick or goes bust or runs out of
money or whatever it is then the
depositors don't have to worry about
their savings because the FDIC will dip
into the pool and make them whole up to
a certain amount now the big concern
about the FDIC is that if a whole bunch
of big banks go bust all at the same
time well then the fun could run out of
money in which case it's going to go to
the government and the government would
step in and bail it out with taxpayer
dollars so clearly just like severus
snape the FDIC does have some issues but
it has our best interests at heart and
it was actually very useful during the
financial crisis when it really
preserved the banking sector and held it
together by reassuring depositors that
their savings were safe which is a good
thing because if we'd all gone running
down to the bank to get all of our money
out at the same time could have left us
very badly needing a drink and no the
FDIC had nothing to do with the death of
Albus Dumbledore