Another cross-border parallel

The recent rumblings about E-Trade's credit loss woes have a lot of investors (specifically, E-Trade's brokerage customers) worried about what might happen if E-Trade were actually to go bankrupt.

This is not the same thing as a bank failing, where cash deposits (up to the applicable limit) are insured under either the CDIC or FDIC (depending on which side of the Canada-US border you frequent). Investment assets (such as stocks and bonds) are not covered by CDIC/FDIC.

However, I was interested to read at My Money Blog that there is a corporation that protects investment assets. The SIPC provides protection of investment assets up to a limit.

Thanks to Canadian Capitalist for pointing out that, once again, we Canucks have a similar corporation, namely the CIPF.

So there's one more piece of cross-border financial arcana sorted out. Here are the links to the two corporations' websites:

CIPF
SIPC