Bank Failure Friday: 7 more banks fail

It's like clockwork. They always try to slip them in when no one is looking.

Regulators closed seven Friday, bringing the total number of failed U.S. banks and savings and loan associations during 2009 to 64.

The New York State Banking Department took over Waterford Village Bank of Clarence, N.Y. and appointed the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. receiver. The FDIC sold all of the failed bank's deposits and branches to Evans Bank of Angola, N.Y., a subsidiary of Evans Bancorp.

The Georgia Department of Banking and Finance then closed the six banks held by Security Bank Corp(SBKC Quote) of Macon, Ga. The FDIC was appointed receiver and sold the deposits and branches of all six failed banks to State Bank and Trust Co. of Pinehurst, Ga.

What is it about Georgia and bank failures?

Subject Meta: 

Forum Categories: 

what is going on in Georgia?

It would be interesting to get a breakdown by region for I notice a large number of these Bank Failure Friday's are in Georgia. What exactly is going on to cause so many in one area? Georgia is not ground zero in terms of residential implosion.

Atlanta is what's going on.

Robert: The Southeast has been hit very, very hard by the real estate bust. Particularly Florida and the metro Atlanta markets were very inflated, and have come crashing down.

The other nexus was the Southwest (California/Nevada). Banks have been imploding there in record numbers as well, but the California failures were *bigger* banks. IndyMac, Downey, PFF, First National, etc., were all banks with $1B+ in assets, and IndyMac had $30 billion. The failures in Georgia are more numerous because they're all *small* local banks, with high concentrations of bad Atlanta-area real estate loans. Security Bank Corp. was the owner of all six of the banks closed in today's action, and they each served only one or two counties.

If you looked at the failures in California versus Georgia in terms of assets, rather than simply the number of failed banks, you'd find that California is very much the epicenter of the crisis.

I was thinking the same thing then I found this

WSJ Article with a graphic showing concentration of failures (as of July 19, 2009).

It sounds like from the article that it was a matter of Georgia banks taking on too much risk and regulators not doing their job. It is just a microcosm of the mortgage crisis.

Guaranty Financial on deck

Guaranty Financial, No.2 Texas bank, says may fail

 NEW YORK (Reuters) - Guaranty Financial Group Inc (GFG.N), the second-largest publicly traded bank in Texas, said it will probably fail after loan losses and write-downs left it "critically" short of capital.

snip

The Austin-based lender has about $16 billion of assets and more than 150 branches in Texas and California, according to its website.

On that basis, if it were to fail, Guaranty would be the largest U.S. bank to collapse in 2009. Guaranty is about half the size of IndyMac Bancorp Inc (IDMCQ.PK), which failed last July.