In 1993, when this article was originally published, Congress had recently passed the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation Improvement Act of 1991 (FDICIA) to reduce taxpayers' exposure to financial system losses, including their exposure at "too big to fail" financial institutions. In his new...

The prompt corrective action provisions in FDICIA 1991 provide the supervisors with an unambiguous goal: "to resolve the problems of insured depository institutions at the least possible long-term cost to the deposit insurance fund." Yet performance of the regulators in achieving this goal has...

Current discussions about deposit insurance reform center on issues such as the size of insurance premiums, the size of the fund, and the size of the coverage limits-all issues that reflect a concern with how to allocate the losses arising from bank failures. The authors of this article argue...

The prompt corrective action provisions in FDICIA 1991 provide the supervisors with an unambiguous goal: "to resolve the problems of insured depository institutions at the least possible long-term cost to the deposit insurance fund." Yet performance of the regulators in achieving this goal has...

This reprint of a 1993 article outlines what Congress intended the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation Improvement Act of 1991 to accomplish. A new preface discusses FDICIA's successes and failures as well as research calling for clearer policies to deal with the problem of "too big to fail"...