Bank failures to surge in coming years
Marketwatch, May 23rd, 2008
IndyMac, Corus, UCBH under pressure as credit crunch slows economy.
By April, Gary Holloway was almost three years into retirement.
He'd built a new home by a lake in Texas, bought a boat and was working
on his golf game. While taking on some part-time work, Holloway also
traveled for months across the U.S. with his wife, from Seattle to
Washington D.C., catching up with old friends and family.
That life of leisure
abruptly changed about six weeks ago when Holloway got a phone call
from his former employer, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., or FDIC,
which regulates U.S. banks and insures deposits.
Holloway, a 30-year FDIC veteran, had worked
extensively with failed lenders in Houston during the savings and loan
crisis in the late 1980s and early 1990s, when thousands of thrifts
collapsed.
Earlier this
year, the FDIC began trying to lure roughly 25 retirees like Holloway
back to prepare for an increase in bank failures. It's also hiring
about 75 new staff.
Holloway quickly went
back to work. ANB Financial N.A., a bank in Bentonville, Ark. with $2.1
billion in assets and $1.8 billion in customer deposits, was failing
and an expert like Holloway was needed to value the assets and find a
stronger institution to take them on.
"I was very excited about coming back," Holloway said
in an interview. "I'm now 57. There's still a lot of life left and the
juices are flowing again."
On May 9, life for ANB
ended when the FDIC and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency,
another bank regulator, announced that the lender was closing.
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