Sheila Bair: Towards and against the crisis

Sheila Bair, 55 years old, has emerged from the shadows… thanks to the crisis. Indeed, the Chairman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC),
a State agency that guarantees American bank deposits, had foreseen the importance of the sub-prime crisis well before the rest of the world. Formerly with the US Department of the Treasury and the New York Exchange, she anticipated the current doldrums early on. And thanks to her reactivity and experience, she has played a considerable role in salvaging financial institutions and managed to gather the key players of the American economy. Her innovations have transformed the FDIC via programmes for procuring guarantees for temporary liquid assets, increasing the limits of deposit insurance, and granting loan modifications to borrowers in difficulty. In 2008, Forbes magazine ranked her the second most powerful woman in the world, after the German Chancellor Angela Merkel. Today, she is one of the rare members of the Republican Party to not only survive, but also strengthen her leadership under the Obama Adminsitration.