Chairman Predicts $4-Billion FDIC Loss in 1990 : Banks: L. William Seidman also hints at a crackdown on dividend payouts by marginally profitable institutions.

Troubled U.S. banks will need about $4 billion in government help this year and about $5 billion next year, Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. Chairman L. William Seidman said Sunday.

Meanwhile, two top Administration officials--Treasury Secretary Nicholas F. Brady and Michael J. Boskin, the White House’s chief economic adviser--predicted that any recession would be mild and brief.

Seidman estimated that about 1,000 banks are on the regulatory agency’s danger list, down from 1,500 two years ago.

The House Banking Committee opens a hearing on the industry today to review an FDIC report that many of the nation’s banks are operating “near or on the brink of insolvency.”

Seidman said on NBC television’s “Meet the Press” that the federal government is going to be about $1 billion short in meeting the $5 billion that it estimates it needs to help ailing banks next year. The industry, not the taxpayer, will have to come up with the money, he said.

“The banks will pay for it,” Seidman said, adding that regulators were working on ways to raise funds from the institutions to cover government costs of financial aid to banks whose loan portfolios have turned sour in a weakened economy.

The report expected to be made public today at the House Banking Committee hearing will predict losses even more glum--$60 billion the next five years.

Seidman brushed the report off, saying, “I don’t take seriously” reports that project that far into the future.

The federally chartered banks’ problems are in addition to those that have swept the savings and loan industry, for which the government may have to pay as much as $200 billion, largely because of bad real estate loans.

Seidman said regulators plan to crack down on banks that award shareholders dividends even though their profits have vanished in a wave of bad loans.

“I think we should stop it,” he said. “I’m for reducing dividends unless they are paid out of earnings.”

Treasury Secretary Nicholas Brady, appearing on the same program as Seidman, agreed that banks are not “as healthy as we would like them.”

He said it was time to reform the industry so it can compete better internationally and to reflect changes that allow deposits and accounts to cross local and regional boundaries.

While avoiding the word recession, Brady acknowledged what government numbers have been showing--that the economy is in a “significant slowdown.”

But he said a recession is “no big deal” and this one will be over in less than a year.

He called on the Federal Reserve Board to lower interest rates.

“I’ve been a little slow to declare ‘national recession day,’ ” Brady said. “But it’s quite clear--there’s no point in being unrealistic--that we’re going to have a significant economic slowdown in the fourth quarter of this year.

“I expect that that will continue into the first quarter of next year. We don’t know how much, but we expect that during 1991 it will turn around and we will be back on the growth path (of) jobs and investment during that year.”