[graemep]

I had the same feeling. I remember the first time I looked at the accounts of North Rock (covering for a colleague at a small fund manager), the first British bank to fail (and the only one to go under rather than getting a bailout) and being horrified at its reliance on interbank markets.

A lot of British banks needed bailing out, but but building societies (mutuals owned by customers, traditionally mortgage lenders but mostly full service retail banks) were fine, but big banks and at least two former building societies that had demutualised were not.

From that point of view it sounds as though Bank of North Dakota sounds like another example of different ownership structures enabling greater stability than shareholder owned big banks do.