This Week's Busted Banks

Three more banks failed this week, bringing the total this year to 98 through the first nine months of 2009.

Banks in Minnesota, Michigan and Colorado were shut by regulators, bringing this year’s toll of U.S. failures to 98 amid the worst financial crisis in more than seven decades.

Jennings State Bank of Spring Grove, Minnesota, and Warren Bank of Warren, Michigan, were closed by state regulators and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. was named receiver, the agency said yesterday in statements on its Web site. Southern Colorado National Bank of Pueblo was closed by the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, the FDIC said.

“Deposits will continue to be insured by the FDIC,” the agency said. “There is no need for customers to change their banking relationship to retain their deposit insurance coverage.”

Regulators this year have closed the most banks since the savings-and-loan crisis of the early 1990s as lenders struggle with mounting losses on real-estate loans. U.S. job losses accelerated last month as the unemployment rate climbed to the highest level since 1983.

U.S. payrolls dropped by 263,000 in September, exceeding the median forecast in a Bloomberg survey, the Labor Department said yesterday. The jobless rate rose to 9.8 percent from 9.7 percent in August, while working hours matched a record low.

The FDIC deposit-insurance fund has been depleted by 120 bank failures in the past two years. The agency proposed asking banks to prepay three years of premiums to raise $45 billion. Yesterday’s failures cost the fund $293.3 million.

And the funeral processions continue as smaller banks are consumed and Too Big To Fail banks become bigger and bigger, assuring the next financial meltdown breaks the back of global finance.