When you travel to Las Vegas you can make a bet on nearly every sporting event. Perhaps in 2010, the odds makers in Sin City will allow people to wager on the number of failed banks nationwide.
Few would have expected a total of 140 United States banks to fail in 2009, up from 25 in 2008 and a mere three in 2007, Zacks Investment Research. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation chairman Shelia Bair stated that the worst of bank failures are not over yet and bank failures will accelerate this year. During the first 15 days of the year alone, four banks — in Utah, Minnesota, Illinois and the State of Washington — were closed by the FDIC.
Last year, some of the biggest failures were banks which were involved extensively in providing real estate financing — Corus Bank, BankUnited, AmTrust Bank to just name a few. And today, many of the banks under review are financial institutions which were intimately involved in commercial real estate financing.
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