Steve Wevodau

WASHINGTON — The head of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. has warned that the fund insuring Americans’ bank deposits could be wiped out this year unless the agency gets the money it is seeking in new fees from U.S. banks and thrifts.FDIC Chairman Sheila Bair acknowledged, in a letter to bank CEOs, that the increased fees and hefty emergency premium that the agency recently voted to levy will impose a “significant expense” on banks, especially amid a recession and financial crisis when their earnings are under pressure.

“We also recognize that assessments reduce the funds that banks can lend in their communities to help revitalize the economy,” Bair wrote.

But given the accelerating bank failures that have been depleting the deposit-insurance fund, she said, it “could become insolvent this year.”

“Without substantial amounts of additional assessment revenue in the near future, current projections indicate that the fund balance will approach zero or even become negative,” Bair wrote in the letter dated Monday to the chief executives of the nation’s 8,305 federally insured banks and thrifts.

The industry, especially smaller community banks, has said the new insurance fees will place an extra burden on a struggling sector. A federal banking regulator said last week the new premiums will unfairly burden smaller banks that didn’t contribute to the financial crisis through reckless lending.

As loan defaults have soared, reflecting the ravages of rising unemployment and sliding home prices, bank failures have risen and sapped billions out of the fund, which insures regular accounts up to $250,000. The fund has its lowest balance in nearly a quarter-century: $18.9 billion as of Dec. 31, compared with $52.4 billion at the end of 2007.

The FDIC now expects that bank failures will cost the insurance fund around $65 billion through 2013, up from an earlier estimate of $40 billion. This year, 17 banks have collapsed so far, compared with 25 in all of 2008, including two of the biggest savings and loans, Washington Mutual and IndyMac Bank.

The new insurance fees are meant to raise $27 billion this year to replenish the fund.

Bair said the plan protects not only bank depositors but also taxpayers because it probably means that the FDIC won’t have to go to the Treasury Department and tap public money to replenish the insurance fund.

Bair has not ruled out a short-term Treasury Department loan, but she said she doesn’t expect to take the more drastic action of using the FDIC’s $30 billion long-term credit line with the department; that has never been done.

The FDIC plan imposes new charges on a battered industry while the Obama administration is seeking to pump as much as $750 billion in additional federal aid into ailing banks under its financial-rescue plan. The FDIC, as a regulatory agency that is to protect the insurance fund, acts independently of the administration.