A Rare Friday That's Free of Bank Failures

Bank failures on Fridays have been so common that it's news when there aren't any closures. Unless the FDIC is very late, today will be one of those rare Fridays this year. The last Friday that was free of bank failures was on July 3rd. However, that's a special case since the FDIC moved its closures to Thursday July 2nd before the long 4th of July weekend. Below is the list of all 2009 Fridays that were free of bank failures:

• October 9
• July 3
• June 12
• May 29
• May 15
• April 3
• March 13
• January 9
• January 2

This is based on the FDIC Failed Bank List. If you see a Friday that I missed, please leave a comment.

On September 29th the FDIC announced its plans to bolster the FDIC Deposit Insurance Fund (see post). In the plan, banks would prepay their assessments for the next three years. In that post readers speculated that the FDIC would stop closing banks soon for the lack of money. It's interesting that we are already seeing a Friday free of closures. However, according to FDIC Chairman Sheila Bair, "our sources of liquidity to protect depositors in future failures include not only the $22 billion of cash and Treasury securities held by the DIF as of June 30, but also the ability to borrow up to $500 billion from the Treasury."

Bank failure related news for this week:

• BusinessWeek article covers two Material Loss Reviews that have been issued by the FDIC Office of Inspector General
• FDIC's press release on the winning bid for Corus Bank assets
• Updated problem bank list (unofficial) from Calculated Risk Blog. The list has 460 banks and includes for each bank regulator enforcement actions such as cease and desist orders.

References:

• FDIC list of failed banks
• Last 20 of my bank failure posts
• $250K FDIC Insurance Limit Extended Through 2013
• 10 Lessons from the 2008 bank failures
• Review of the 2008 credit union liquidations