One of the big themes of the economy over the last year and a half has been a decline in both the rate and volume of financial failure. Mortgage and credit card delinquencies and corporate and personal bankruptcies have all been trending down. So, too, have bank failures. For much of this year, our once-weekly Failure Friday feature, which charts the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation's Friday-evening takeovers of failed banks, has been downgraded to Failure Every-Other-Friday. (Here's the complete failed bank list.) But we may have to go weekly again.
On Friday, March 30, another bank went down.
Fidelity Bank, an eight-branch bank based in Dearborn, Michigan, with $818.2 million assets, failed and was taken over by Huntington National Bank of Columbus, Ohio. This is one of the largest bank failures of the year, and will cost the FDIC insurance fund nearly $93 million.
In the first 13 weeks of 2012, 16 banks with a combined $5.018 billion in assets have failed. That's relatively high by historical standards. But compared to last year, both the number and size of the typical failed bank have fallen. In the first thirteen weeks of 2011, 26 banks with a combined $10 billion in assets failed.
Daniel Gross is economics editor at Yahoo! Finance
Follow him on Twitter @grossdm; email him at grossdaniel11@yahoo.com
His next book, Better, Stronger, Faster: The Myth of American Decline and the Rise of a New Economy will be published in May and is available for pre-order.