[AnimalMuppet]

So I looked it up. As of September 30, 2022, there are 4,746 commercial banks in the US. That's 11.8% failure in 23 years. That includes 2008.

Those banks total $23.6 trillion in assets. Looking at the tweet cited by ezekg, I'd eyeball that as about $1 trillion in assets in the banks that have failed in the last 23 years. So, 11.8% by number of banks, but only 4.2% by assets.

That's still more than I thought. But the real question is, of those $1 trillion in assets, how much did people actually lose, and how much did either the FDIC or a taking-over bank cover? Anybody have that number?

[dpkirchner]

I'm curious how many of these banks were young -- like were they fly-by-nights or were they established players that made bad bets?

[Scoundreller]

Plenty of small and old banks across USA. Not sure how they get by on the back-office side, but they do!

Just looked up a US sibling's bank and it was chartered over 100 years ago and has 3 branches.

Then there are credit unions, which are another beast that sits outside of FDIC.

[SkyPuncher]

Most of those are probably small, "startup" banks.

I lived in a small city for a few years. Annually, I saw the cycle of failed bank buildings having a new banks name put up, only to fail.

[vkou]

> But the real question is, of those $1 trillion in assets, how much did people actually lose, and how much did either the FDIC or a taking-over bank cover? Anybody have that number?

Zero.

Since the FDIC was founded, no depositor has lost a dollar of deposits in an FDIC-insured institution.

There are some non-deposit things that, if you squinted, looked a bit like deposits, and people have lost out on those.

[MrFoof]

I believe the reason you are being downvoted is over a technicality.

It is correct that no depositor has ever lost a penny of FDIC-insured deposits. This is excellent for the average person, as the average normally-employed person isn’t the one worrying about losing large piles of money.

Uninsured deposits is an entirely different ball of wax. In the case of IndyMac for example, of the ~$19B in deposits, roughly ~$1B was uninsured. This was out of ~$32B AUM. I’m not sure what haircut was taken on uninsured deposits, nor other instruments. FDIC’s Sheila Behr has spoken about the receivership of IndyMac in the past and has said that the FDIC’s reserve took about a $9B hit to deal with IndyMac.

[Scoundreller]

From what I can find, the uninsured IndyMac depositors lost 50% of the uninsured amount. They got that 50% FDIC Advanced Dividend and I can't find any records of anything further beyond that initial 50%.

[jacquesm]

What's the distribution by size?