Regulators Shut Banks In Colo., Ga., Kan.

(CBS/AP)  More trouble in an already troubling banking market.

Regulators on Friday shut down banks in Georgia, Colorado and Kansas, marking 20 failures of federally insured banks this year. More are expected to succumb to the prolonged recession.

The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. was appointed receiver of the failed banks.

FirstCity Bank of Stockbridge, Ga., had about $297 million in assets and $278 million in deposits as of March 18.

The FDIC said it will mail checks to depositors of FirstCity Bank for their insured funds on Monday morning. Customers will have to open new accounts elsewhere. Direct deposits
from the federal government, such as Social Security and veterans' benefits payments, will be transferred to SunTrust Bank. Non-governmental automatic deposits or withdrawals will be refused and returned.

Bank representatives said there will be no access to ATMs at FirstCity Bank. Checks not cleared will be returned.

At the time of closing, FirstCity Bank had an estimated $778,000 in deposits that exceeded the insurance limits, the FDIC said. Regular deposit accounts are insured up to $250,000.

Colorado National Bank of Colorado Springs, Colo., had $123.5 million in assets and total deposits of $82.7 million as of Dec. 31.

Amarillo, Texas-based Herring Bank will assume all of the deposits of Colorado National, whose four branches will reopen as Herring Bank branches on Saturday.

In addition to assuming all of the deposits of the failed bank, Herring Bank agreed to buy about $117.3 million in assets at a discount of $4.2 million. The bank agreed to pay a 1 percent premium on the deposits.

The FDIC said it will keep the bank's remaining assets for future sale. Additionally, Herring Bank entered into a loss sharing agreement with the FDIC, wherein the FDIC will assume 80 percent of the losses and Herring Bank 20 percent of the losses on $62 million in assets.

Paola, Kan.-based Teambank N.A. had assets of $669.8 million and total deposits of $492.8 million as of Dec. 31. Teambank's 17 branches will reopen on Saturday as branches of Great Southern Bank. The Springfield, Mo.-based bank is assuming $474 million of Teambank's deposits for about $4.7 million, while the FDIC is paying out $18.8 million in deposits directly to brokers.

Great Southern Bank has also agreed to buy about $656.5 million in assets at a discount of $100 million. The remaining assets will be sold at a later date, the FDIC said. Additionally, the FDIC has agreed to cover 80 percent of the losses on about $450 million in assets, while Great Southern Bank will cover the remaining 20 percent of losses.

The FDIC said Teambank was affiliated with Colorado National Bank.

The FDIC estimates that the cost to the deposit insurance fund from the closings of the three banks will be about $207 million.

As the economy sours, unemployment rises, home prices tumble and loan defaults soar, bank failures have cascaded and sapped billions out of the deposit insurance fund. It now stands at its lowest level in nearly a quarter-century, $18.9 billion as of Dec. 31, compared with $52.4 billion at the end of 2007.

The FDIC expects that bank failures will cost the insurance fund around $65 billion through 2013.

The agency said Friday that the nation's banks and thrifts lost $32.1 billion in the final quarter of last year, even worse than the $26.2 billion originally reported last month. "Significant" revisions also lowered the industry's net income for all of 2008 to $10.2 billion from $16.1 billion.

[pravin404]

2 banks failed on Good Friday, "Cape Fear Bank, Wilmington, NC " and "New Frontier Bank, Greeley, CO".

This makes 23 bank fails this year and 48 from start of year 2008.

Cape Fear Bank was the first bank from North Carolina to fail while New Frontier Bank becomes the second bank to fail from Colorado this year.

Nobody know how many more banks are going to fail. Prediction is in hundreds of bank.

I found list of failed banks and the map of where the banks are failing on portalseven.com
The page locations are :

Map of failed banks : http://portalseven.com/finance/Failed_Banks_Map_Since_2008.jsp

List of banks failed in 2009 : http://portalseven.com/Failed-Banks-2009

Do check it.

Pravin

[pravin404]

2 banks failed on Good Friday, "Cape Fear Bank, Wilmington, NC " and "New Frontier Bank, Greeley, CO".
This makes 23 bank fails this year and 48 from start of year 2008.
Nobody know how many more banks are going to fail. Prediction is in hundreds of bank.
I found list of failed banks and the map of where the banks are failing on portalseven.com

The url is

Map of failed banks : http://portalseven.com/finance/Failed_Banks_Map_Since_2008.jsp

List of banks failed in 2009 : http://portalseven.com/Failed-Banks-2009

Do check it.

Pravin

[Correct247]

Obama is planning on outlining a plan and is "expected to be unveiled this week in preparation for his first foreign summit meeting in early April.

"Increasing oversight of executive pay has been under consideration for some time, but the decision was made in recent days as public fury over bonuses has spilled into the regulatory effort.

The officials said that the administration was still debating the details of its plan, including how broadly it should be applied and how far it could range beyond simple reporting requirements. Depending on the outcome of the discussions, the administration could seek to put the changes into effect through regulations rather than through legislation.

One proposal could impose greater requirements on the boards of companies to tie executive compensation more closely to corporate performance and to take other steps to assure that outsize bonuses are not paid before meeting financial goals.The new rules will cover all financial institutions, including those not now covered by any pay rules because they are not receiving U.S. government bailout money. Officials say the rules could also be applied more broadly to publicly traded companies, which already report about some executive pay practices to the Securities and Exchange Commission. Last month, as part of the stimulus package, Congress barred top executives at large banks getting rescue money from receiving bonuses exceeding one-third of their annual pay.

Beyond the pay rules, officials said the regulatory plan is expected to call for a broad new role for the Federal Reserve to oversee large companies, including major hedge funds, whose problems could pose risks to the entire financial system.

"The argument some are making is that they don't want to be stepping on the gas pedal and the brake at the same time," said Morris Goldstein, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics and a former top official at the International Monetary Fund".

http://www.iht.com/articles/2009/03/22/america/22regulate.php

[Correct247]

Hitler, Hussein, and every other tyrant was eventually defeated because they made one serious mistake--they let the world know their name. The world had a definite target.

The International Mafia is so effective because they never seek publicity. Gates? Buffett? They are merely puppets / tools for the International Mafia. You will *NEVER* see the names of the people who truly control the world, who are responsible for orchestrating the current global financial crisis, touted in the media.
Posted by anon00-2009 at 11:31 PM : Mar 21, 2009
************************************************************************

You are right on target!

[pepperp1]

....hmmmm now who was it started this, OH yeah Sen Schumer and the run on Indy Bank......

[gce651]

Wow! Stockbridge, GA...............and Paola, KS...................and Colorado Springs, CO.

Can't get much more conservative than those 3 places.

[ubrew12]

arthur194 said: "the bank acts like I put 40,000 dollars in the bank? How come I only get 2% interest? "

They have a government granted right to borrow 10-40 times their deposits, if the money they invest goes into American home mortgages (as good as gold, we told the world). What was needed was a further way to leverage those mortgages into true investment capital that could be invested in the fabulous growth overseas (esp in China and India). Enter derivatives, repackaged mortgages that allowed ANOTHER leverage of 30 times, with the SAME house as collateral (!!!!), as long as the derivative can be a high rating, easy as long as the credit rating agency is in the pocket of the bank.

Each American home was leveraged by factors as high as 900 times its value. Bankers, and their enablers, were pocketing the interest on ALL that overleveraged 'money'. All you got was an huge mortgage payment. Eventually, some American homeowners couldn't make their payments and the system collapsed. The banks knew all along they were 'too big to fail', and that their collapse would NOT be borne by them, but by you, the taxpayer.

And that, pretty much, is where we are. Obama's unwillingness to bankrupt the international banks says he may be too much influenced by their power. Whether you are on the left or right, the bankers set up a system whereby if their gambles paid off, they got rich, and if their gambles went bust, you got poor. Unfortunately for you, the latter happened.

[txlakeside]

The dumb as dirt repubs here are at the scare tactics again! FDIC insures each account up to $250,000. If you have mare than $250,000 in any one account you could open a joint account. You can open one and your wife can open one. You could take your monies above $250,000 and go to another bank and deposit it. Each account is insured! If a person has more than $250,000 in any one account they are stupid! The scare tactics are aimed at the ignorant and odds are you do not have $250,000, just lots of ignorance and will be a puppet for the repuliCONS!! The repubs did all this same BS with the Savings and Loans in the late 80's. Little GOV oversite, Reagans trickle down and lax regulations brought the S&L's to their knees! It took Reagan just about as long to bring the S&Ls down as it did Bush and Creww to let the banks and Wall Street run wild. They are now repeating the same crashing of the banks 20 years later! Thank goodness there is at least an intelligent man in office and not the dumb as dirt Reagan or Bush! Dumb as dirt republiCONS!

[ubrew12]

Now the really creative part, credit default swaps. The investment bankers (also allowed to be insurance companies), wanting to hedge against losses and find additional sources of income, buy and sell credit default swaps which are bets for and against the likelihood of the system to continue to grow. While the rules, or lack of rules, allow an unlimited number of these credit default swaps to be bought and sold and does not require the buyer or seller to have any ownership at all in the bond upon which the bet is placed. For simplicity, let?s assume only one credit default swap betting against the bond is sold (the actual figure is much higher). But, since we assume only one is sold, we have only doubled the potential liability to $113,400,000 ? all from our $1,000.
Because of our ?too big to fail? financial system and the fact that our financial elites own our government, the taxpayers are on the hook for $113,400,000. So, when we quit paying our mortgages because we are deadbeat losers or whatever and the real estate values supporting this pyramid drop below the amounts owed; we the taxpayers are on the hook to make the bankers whole, pay all bets.
Multiply the $1,000 a few times and you get to the hundreds of trillions of dollars that is being legally stolen from taxpayers. The question is who gets the money? Who owns the banks?

[ubrew12]

Start with $1,000 earned from building widgets with value deposited in our local bank in a savings account. At the end of a year, the bank pays us interest ? even at 5% (1.5% is closer), it is only $50. But the bank needs to make a profit, so our rules allow them to leverage our $1,000 by 25, 30, even 40 to 1; so using the 30 to 1 leverage; the bank makes a home loan of $30,000 and collects interest at 5%. The bank earns $1,500 on our $1,000 savings.
As a commercial bank, it has to borrow the $29,000 using the value of the property securing the mortgages as collateral, and would pay interest of say 1.5% or $435. So, the bank now has earned about $1,000 on our $1,000 in savings and can leverage that into $30,000 more mortgages and during the second year, our $1,000 has earned the bank another $2000.
This can and does go on and on with the bank doubling their earnings on our savings each year. After only five years, the bank is earning $32,000 a year on our $1,000 deposit. Everything is safe because home values keep rising.
Because they have leveraged our $1,000 and the net interest earned each year; the bank now has $1,890,000 worth of real estate backed mortgages.
Pretty sweet but not even close to the end. Our bank now sells these mortgages to an investment bank ? or, since they are often the same bank, does an accounting entry. The investment bank now has $1,890,000 in value from our $1,000 savings. The rules allow them to securitize this asset into a bond which is rated; by their owned and controlled rating agency as AAA meaning it is as good as cash. The rules allow the investment bank to leverage as well, so our $1,000 now has become $56,700,000 which they loan to commercial banks for more mortgages. The cycle continues, remember we only have $1,000 in cash and as long as real state values continue to rise and the mortgage holders continue to make their payments, the system continues to grow, exponentially with bankers realizing a profit every step of the way. Even at 1.5%, the investment bank is earning $850,500 each year and yes, we are still getting our $50 dollars a year.