No one could've predicted…

In case anyone was wondering about the banks:

Tired of the government bailing out banks? Get ready for this: officials may soon ask banks to bail out the government.

Senior regulators say they are seriously considering a plan to have the nation’s healthy banks lend billions of dollars to rescue the insurance fund that protects bank depositors. That would enable the fund, which is rapidly running out of money because of a wave of bank failures, to continue to rescue the sickest banks.

The plan, strongly supported by bankers and their lobbyists, would be a major reversal of fortune. (emphasis mine)

How odd.  So how is this fund usually filled?

The FDIC maintains the [Deposit Insurance Fund] by assessing depository institutions an insurance premium. The amount each institution is assessed is based both on the balance of insured deposits as well as on the degree of risk the institution poses to the insurance fund.

-Wiki entry on the FDIC.

Whoops…looks like a case of drastically optimistic low-balling on that premium.  Thus, the reason the banks & their lobbyists prefer loaning the government the money — ironic, what with the bailouts an’ all — becomes screamingly obvious.  Let’s go back to that first article…

A hallmark of the financial crisis has been the decision by successive administrations over the last year to lend hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars to large and small banks.

“It’s a nice irony,” said Karen Shaw Petrou, managing partner of Federal Financial Analytics, a consulting company. “Like so much of this crisis, this is an issue that involves the least worst options.”

Bankers and their lobbyists like the idea because it is more attractive than the alternatives: yet another across-the-board emergency assessment on them, or tapping an existing $100 billion credit line to the Treasury. [...] Bankers worry that a special assessment of $5 billion to $10 billion over the next six months would crimp their profits and could push a handful of banks into deeper financial trouble or even receivership. And any new borrowing from the Treasury would be construed as a taxpayer bailout that could open the industry to a political reaction, resulting in a wave of restrictions like fresh limits on executive pay.

Translation: “We don’t just want you to save our asses, we want to make a profit off of you saving our asses, disguised as us helping you.”  A game of three-card monte looks like less of a screw-job in comparison to dealing with these people.