It may well be that Italy's most successful international bank these days is an obscure savings institution, the Cassa di Risparmio di Trieste.

ECONOMIST: Borderline banking

Payouts will also no longer be reduced by the amount of money that a saver might also owe their savings institution - for instance by the size of a mortgage or other loan.

BBC: Savings protection limit increases to ?85,000

In the late '80s and early '90s, there were the Keating Five, five senators accused of helping Charles Keating, chairman of a collapsed savings and loan institution, avoid a searching investigation.

NPR: Abramoff Latest in String of Congressional Scandals

According to Bill Gale, a savings expert at the Brookings Institution, virtually all the net new saving that has occurred through tax incentives has been by less-affluent Americans.

ECONOMIST: The precarious politics of prosperity

Ironically, the government's failure to restore public confidence in banks may be good news for its own postal savings system, which, as the world's biggest financial institution, controls about a third of the savings market and is badly in need of reform.

ECONOMIST: Bank reform in Japan

All of these accounts are FDIC insured. (You can check whether an online savings account is FDIC insured at the official FDIC institution directory.) All info is current as of 26 June 2011.

FORBES: Best Savings Accounts for 2011

If today's M2M accounting rules had been applied during the 1980s savings and loan crisis and the 1990 recession, every major U.S. financial institution would have gone down.

FORBES: Will Obama End Mark-To-Market?