Thursday, July 24, 2008

Should the FDIC watch blogs or banks?

Maybe the FDIC should do it's job of watching the banks, then they would not have to watch the blogs. Actually most blogs were saying "Don't pull your money out of IndyMac" after the bank closure, something the FDIC should have relayed to the depositers.

FDIC learns it ignores bloggers at its peril


The federal agency insuring bank deposits learned that it can't afford to ignore the blogs following its seizure this month of IndyMac Bank, the largest bank failure since the 1980s.

"The blogs were a bit out of control," Sheila Bair, chairman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., told the San Francisco Business Times after a speech in San Francisco this week.

That's putting it mildly. Following the FDIC's takeover of IndyMac on July 11, widely followed blogs were speculating on bank runs on some of California's largest banks based on nothing more than people waiting for their branch to open or large deposits moving between financial institutions.

The FDIC plans to pay closer attention to the blogosphere in the future.

"We're very mindful of the media coverage and blogs in controlling misinformation. All I can say is were going to continue to stay on top of it," Bair said. "The misinformation that came out over the weekend fed a lot of depositors' fears."

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