For the first time in three weeks, on Friday April 20, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation closed a bank. The casualty was tiny Fort Lee Federal Savings Bank, a one-branch bank in Fort Lee, New Jersey, with about $52 million in assets. The FDIC took control of Fort Lee Federal Savings and sold it to Alma Bank, a small institution started in Astoria, Queens, in 2007.
Through the first 16 weeks of 2011, only 17 banks with a combined $5.07 billion in assets have failed. That's relatively high by historical standards. But in the first sixteen weeks of 2011, 34 banks with a combined $14.8 billion in assets failed. So far this year, then, bank failures are running at less than half the rate of 2011. (Here's the complete failed bank list.)
Daniel Gross is economics editor at Yahoo! Finance
Follow him on Twitter @grossdm; email him at grossdaniel11@yahoo.com