[waterhouse]

I'm not necessarily a fan of how things currently work, but I believe the FDIC is supposed to insure up to $250k on each bank account. That would seem to mean it wouldn't hurt most people, only people (and institutions?) that put much more than that into individual bank accounts. I suspect most of those would have also put lots into other types of investments, so I don't think anyone would be completely wiped out. That doesn't sound apocalyptic to me.

[dragonwriter]

> I believe the FDIC is supposed to insure up to $250k on each bank account.

Close, it's actually $250K per depositor per ownership category per institution. Multiple accounts in the same category don't add insurance limits.

[manigandham]

The economy is far more than just people's personal checking accounts, and many people do accumulate more than that over their life.

The loss of money in the commercial sector means (after a series of cascading failures) we're all unemployed and burning dollars to stay warm.