She was appointed to the post for a five-year term on June 26, 2006. Bair will also serve as a member of the FDIC Board of Directors through July 2013.
Bair also pursued a seat in the U.S. Congress (she lost the 1990 Republican nomination in her Kansas district by 760 votes). Bair began her career in the General Counsel’s office of the former US Department of Health, Education and Welfare.
Bair assumed a prominent role in the Bush administration’s response to the crisis, including successfully pressing for a provision in the federal government’s financial rescue bill that temporarily raised the cap on FDIC insured deposits to $250,000 per account. She also used regulatory powers to temporarily guarantee bank debt and insure all non-interest bearing deposits to an unlimited amount. Additionally, Bair worked with the Treasury Department to inject capital into the country’s largest financial institutions.
Bair publicly criticized the Bush Administration’s $700 billion bailout package, saying it will not do enough to help Americans facing foreclosures. Bair told the Wall Street Journal “[W]e’re attacking it at the [financial] institution level as opposed to the borrower level, and it’s the borrowers defaulting. That is what’s causing the distress at the institution level,” she said. “So why not tackle the borrower problem?”
Her invective will serve to further terrorize men who wear belts and suspenders. It will not unfreeze credit markets.
>and insure all non-interest bearing deposits to an unlimited amount...
And what would those be?