Another Great Depression?

[Mr. Bloom]

As I understand it, the FDIC can return your money to you anytime within 50 years or something like that. They aren't under the gun to give it to you during your lifetime.

As a practical matter, I don't believe that this is true for insured deposits. That may be the case for uninsured deposits where the underlying assets (generally loans) of the institution have to be collected first. Uninsured deposits will still have priority to other creditors in liquidation. With Indymac, they've already approved a 50% dividend which means that half of the uninsured deposits are being made available to the account holders (indicating that they believe there's value in the liquidation).

As a practical matter, on insured deposits, the name of the bank simply chanages following the failure...

If anyone knows differently, I welcome the record being set strength.

Keep in mind, when I say "as a practical matter", there's been over 3,000 bank failures in the last 30 years...there's good precedent on their actions/behaviors.