The Dangers of Deposit Insurance Arbitrage

I'll coin this term in order to explain the travesty that is being allowed in the banking industry. Institutions are literally paying little old ladies' less than a half a percent on their life savings and using said funds to gamble in the risk fraught derivatives market, with the risk being totally underwritten by the government through the:

1. FDIC (deposit insurance and bond insurance - although to date this expense has been born by the industry, the FDIC is insolvent and may very well have to tap the Treasury, ie. the taxpayer: see I'm going to try not to say I told you so...),
2. Treasury (via TARP and associate measures, see America, You have been outright lied to! Bamboozled! Swindled! Hoodwinked! The Worst Case Scenario) and
3. Federal Reserve (ZIRP, QE, and a whole slew of programs I only wish I knew about - see The Fed Believes Secrecy is in Our Best Interests. Here are Some of the Secrets).

A perfect example of how the big banks are carrying this arbitrage out is outlined in "The Next Step in the Bank Implosion Cycle???", but the global economy risking behemoths are not the only one's that arbitrage bank deposit funds via FDIC guarantees. Earlier this year, I featured research on a smaller bank, Bank of Oklahoma (BOKF), which I found participated in some pretty suspect accounting moves. Despite these "gimmicks" the stock floated higher with the general market and particularly the banking sector. OF course, this does nothing to cure the ills that they have been papering over.