# FDIC The **Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation** is the [[New Deal]] government corporation, created by the Banking Act of 1933 after the [[1929 Stock Market Crash]] and the bank runs that followed, that insures deposits (up to $250,000 per depositor per bank since 2008) and takes over and resolves banks that fail. It is the reason the classic bank run disappeared from American life after 1933; it is funded by premiums on the banks it insures, not by taxes, through the Deposit Insurance Fund. It shares supervision of the banking system with the [[OCC]] (national banks), the [[Federal Reserve]] (holding companies and state member banks) and state regulators — a three-headed structure that every reform proposal since the [[Savings and Loan Crisis]] has tried to simplify. ## What it does when it matters Most years the FDIC is invisible. In crisis it is the state. The [[Savings and Loan Crisis]] page carries its 1980s counterpart, the [[Resolution Trust Corporation]]; the 2023 regional-bank failures are its most recent test — [[Silicon Valley Bank]] (March 10), [[Signature Bank]] (March 12) and [[First Republic Bank]] (May 1), the largest cluster since 2008. The FDIC was named receiver of all three, invoked the systemic-risk exception to guarantee *uninsured* deposits at SVB and Signature, and sold First Republic to JPMorgan. The [[Cascading Failure]] page uses the weekend of March 10–12 as its model case. The crypto industry's [[Debanking]] and [[Operation Choke Point 2.0]] narratives run through the same weekend, arguing that regulators used the failures as cover to push banks out of digital assets; the FDIC's own supervisory letters to banks about crypto exposure are the documentary core of that claim. ## 2025–26 Travis Hill, a board member since 2022 and a former deputy to Jelena McWilliams, became acting chairman in January 2025 and was confirmed **53–43 on December 19, 2025**, sworn in January 2026. His stated agenda is the industry's: "rational" merger review, indexed regulatory thresholds, lower barriers for fintech and crypto to enter mainstream banking, tailored rules for small banks, and — the item that connects to the vault's crypto pages — ending "debanking," which Hill and the administration have treated as a supervisory abuse to be reversed. The [[Financial Regulation]] page tracks the broader rollback; the [[Project 2025]] proposals to merge the FDIC's supervisory function into the OCC or the Fed remain proposals. The [[Affirm]] page shows the consumer-lending edge of the same deregulatory turn. ## Why it matters The FDIC is the least ideological agency in the [[Financial System Hub]] and the one whose failure would be felt fastest. It links from the [[Government Corporations Hub]] as the model of a self-funded federal corporation; from the [[Senate Banking Committee]] and [[Cryptocurrency Regulation Timeline]] as a regulator being turned; and from [[Financial Regulation]] as the institution whose independence — like the FTC's after [[Trump v. Slaughter]] — now rests on the President's forbearance rather than on statute. ## See Also - [[The Banking System]] · [[Financial Regulation]] · [[Financial System Hub]] · [[Government Corporations Hub]] - [[Silicon Valley Bank]] · [[Signature Bank]] · [[First Republic Bank]] · [[Savings and Loan Crisis]] · [[Resolution Trust Corporation]] - [[OCC]] · [[Federal Reserve]] · [[Senate Banking Committee]] - [[Debanking]] · [[Operation Choke Point 2.0]] · [[Cryptocurrency Regulation Timeline]]