It depends on what we're trying to visualize. From an investor's perspective, a bank whose assets get sold for pennies on the dollar in a fire sale is essentially a failure. Lehmann Brothers was also a massive (investment) bank failure with huge second order effects on the economy.
This graphic seems to be modeling things from a taxpayer perspective. These banks failed and the government needed to step in to do something to ensure people could get their deposits.
The government stepped in in the missing cases too, just not the FDIC. Many of the missing cases had large securities trading and investment banking activities (e.g. Bear Stearns - ~400B), and so it was the Fed and SEC that were most involved in their forced sales.
WaMu was bought by JPM and is on the chart, presumably due to the FDIC involvement, whereas Bear, which was a similar size and was also bought by JPM is not.
FDIC premiums are not payed by taxpayers. What we're visualizing here are bank failures assumed by FDIC. The too big to fail banks didn't technically fail, but to give an accurate picture of a financial crisis they should be on the graph.
Agree, this representation also makes WaMu’s failure look like the worst in recent history but it felt like one of the smaller problems at the time with what was going on with the investment banks, Fannie/Freddie and AIG.
Tax payers are legally required to pay taxes in USD. I'm not actually sure if the IRS technically accepts cash but if so it would be extremely rare. Meaning all tax payers have a bank account and ultimately foot the bill even though it is technically funneled through the banks' books first.
"Footing the bill by having a bank account" is one of those very-hard-to-picture-or-feel things in days when most bank accounts are "free" and these banks have so many lines of business. E.g. am I paying for FRBs bailout by increased loan application fees if I buy a house or car or such? That's what I'd imagine, or maybe it's just that maybe otherwise savings accounts would pay a bit more interest or something?
Yeah it's tricky, if not impossible, to pin down exactly how any one person's money flows through the books but at the end of the day all bank profits come from their customers. We may pay account fees, overdraft fees, document and origination fees when they open a loan, interest on a loan if they don't sell it, etc.
Banks are in an interesting place because effectively any tax payer is going to have to have a bank account. In my opinion, that means tax payers are directly funding banks and the FDIC.
There are other types of customers for banks so I wouldn't argue that tax payers are exclusively paying those feels but it feel disingenuous to see politicians claim tax payers aren't footing the bill at all.
This graphic seems to be modeling things from a taxpayer perspective. These banks failed and the government needed to step in to do something to ensure people could get their deposits.