One of Rep. Paul Broun’s (R-GA) most frequent targets is the federal government, which he has in the past claimed is going to kill people by passing comprehensive health care reform and clean energy legislation. Now, the Atlanta Journal Constitution has discovered that Broun “was a part-owner of a bank” started by his brother that failed in March and had to be taken over by the FDIC to protect its depositors, meaning that the very same federal government the congressman demonizes was forced to save his failing business and its customers. Asked for comment by the paper, Broun attacked the federal government, saying that it’s “totally wrong” for the government to be taking over failed banks like his and protecting the depositors:
But after an Atlanta Journal-Constitution examination of congressional financial disclosure forms revealed that Broun was an investor in the [failed] bank, the Republican congressman from Athens had a very strong opinion about who’s to blame: the federal government. “The federal government is closing these banks down when there is absolutely no reason to do so,” he said. “It’s just totally wrong.”
State and federal regulators on March 26 shut down four-branch McIntosh Commercial and sold its assets to West Point, Ga.-based CharterBank after determining McIntosh was insolvent and unable to pay its debts. The bank, founded in 2002, lost $28 million over the past two years and had $88 million in troubled loans on its books. The failure was expected to cost the federal Deposit Insurance Fund more than $123 million. […]
“Sheila Bair [the FDIC’s chairman] and the FDIC that’s forcing all of this, under the direction of this [Obama] administration, needs to back off and let community banks do what they should be doing,” [Broun] said.
Of course, if the federal government were to “back off” from its New Deal-era FDIC program and allow a failed bank like the one Broun co-owned to close down, its depositors would lose millions of dollars in their savings through no fault of their own. “Our job is to protect depositors,” FDIC spokesman LaJuan Williams-Young told the press. “We don’t want depositors to lose any money. And when it comes to an institution that a regulator has deemed insolvent, as soon as that is closed, the safer depositors are.”
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