Still keep your money in a bank? You might want to read this whole article. If you don't take steps to secure your own money now, you might wake up one day soon without any.
US bank failures loom | Thought Criminal
Coffee can buried in the yard or garden (which you will need soon for sustinance) is becoming the only 'safe' bank. If the money itself holds any value at all into the future.
Personal investments of time and money for a ("Victory"? Anyone remember that?) garden and a flock of chickens and other small livestock may soon be the only security one may sustain. Those who are not moving to self-sufficiency may soon find themselves without the most basic of necessities nor the ability to procure them.
Unless you steal from those of us who are preparing for the worst.
US bank failures loom | Thought Criminal
By April, Gary Holloway was almost three years into retirement. He'd built a new home by a lake in Texas, bought a boat and was working on his golf game. While taking on some part-time work, Holloway also travelled for months across the US with his wife, from Seattle to Washington DC, catching up with old friends and family.
That life of leisure abruptly changed about six weeks ago when Holloway got a phone call from his former employer, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp, or FDIC, which regulates US banks and insures deposits.
Earlier this year, the FDIC began trying to lure roughly 25 retirees like Holloway back to prepare for an increase in bank failures. It's also hiring about 75 new staff. Holloway quickly went back to work. ANB Financial NA, a bank in Bentonville, Ark with $2.1 billion in assets and $1.8 billion in customer deposits, was failing and an expert like Holloway was needed to value the assets and find a stronger institution to take them on.
On May 9, life for ANB ended when the FDIC and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, another bank regulator, announced that the lender was closing. Only three banks have failed so far in 2008. But that number is set to surge as the credit crunch slows economic growth and hammers some lenders that grew too fast during the recent real-estate boom, experts say.
Things may get worse before they get better: At least 150 banks will fail in the US during the next two to three years, according to a projection by Gerard Cassidy and his colleagues at RBC Capital Markets.
If the current economic slowdown deteriorates into a recession on the scale of those from the 1980's and early 1990's, the number of failures will be much higher this time around - probably as high as 300 of them, by RBC's reckoning. That's a massive surge compared to the recent boom years of the credit and real estate markets. From the second half of 2004 through end of 2006 there were 10 consecutive quarters without a bank failure in the US - a record length of time, Cassidy notes.
Coffee can buried in the yard or garden (which you will need soon for sustinance) is becoming the only 'safe' bank. If the money itself holds any value at all into the future.
Personal investments of time and money for a ("Victory"? Anyone remember that?) garden and a flock of chickens and other small livestock may soon be the only security one may sustain. Those who are not moving to self-sufficiency may soon find themselves without the most basic of necessities nor the ability to procure them.
Unless you steal from those of us who are preparing for the worst.
