Dennis Santiago

Like a wave of tornadoes touching down, the FDIC struck across the country on Friday shuttering five banks from coast to coast. The regulator took down Plantation Federal in Pawleys Island, South Carolina, Bank of the Eastern Shore of Cambridge and HarVest Bank of Maryland in Gaithersburg, Maryland, Inter Savings...

Recent high-profile current events have called into question legal statutes commonly known as "Stand Your Ground" laws. Sparked by a frenzy of media coverage of a shooting in Florida that is now thankfully winding its way through the real court system, pundits have engaged in weeks of knee jerk tabloid...

The Bank of America seems to have a knack for stepping on its own feet. The institution that continues to struggle with cleaning up a mortgage portfolio that includes the remnants of the acquisition of Countrywide has been at a disadvantage competing with better-positioned competitors in the performing loan accumulation...

Dearborn, Mich. -- The FDIC closed Fidelity Bank today following almost two years of being undercapitalized as the result of a collapsing market in mortgages and commercial real estate. It's parent holding company Dearborn Bancorp, Inc. had been struggling with capital woes since March of 2010. It had failed to...

The U.S. Department of the Treasury announced today that it is commencing secondary public offerings of the preferred stock it holds in the following six institutions. For you users of the IRA Bank Monitor, here are the ID numbers to punch up to look at them,

2126977...

The FDIC closed the second bank of 2012 to fail with no acquirer today. South Michigan Avenue became the focus of Friday evening activities to shutter the $71 million institution. The bank had been internally stressed for sometime and took a turn for the worse around the middle of 2011....

The FDIC closed another bank in Georgia this week bringing the total to three so far in 2012. Global Commerce Bank in Doraville, Ga. became the latest casualty of the bank clean up's march through the South. The $143.6 million asset bank had been under capitalized for over a year....

It doesn't happen very often, but this week one of the two banks closed by the FDIC failed to find a buyer. Such failures have been rare events to date as the regulator resolves troubled institutions. The preferred strategy is to sell the failing bank to a stronger acquiring institution,...

On Friday, Feb. 10, 2012 the FDIC shifted bank closure activity from the south to the center of the country this week failing Charter National Bank and Trust in Hoffman Estates, Ill. and SCB Bank of Shelbyville, Ind. SCB at $200B assets was the larger of the two and began...

Maybe that Mayan calendar is right and the world will be ending shortly after the presidential election. You'd certainly think so by the furor of deck chair arranging going on in the banking industry. I'm told the buzz of the 2012 season of meetings is all about "Who's buying whom?"...

The FDIC shuttered four additional banks today bringing the 2012 count to seven. The four banks closed were BankEast in Knoxville, Tenn., Patriot Bank Minnesota in Forest Lake, Minn., Tennessee Commerce Bank in Franklin, Tenn. and First Guaranty Bank and Trust Company of Jacksonville in Jacksonville, Fla. The general pattern...

The FDIC closed it's first banks of 2012 today. A total of three insitutions were shuttered by the regulator. Central Florida State Bank of Belleview, Florida, The First State Bank of Stockbridge, Georgia and American Eagle Savings Bank of Boothwyn, Pennsylvannia each received the dreaded visit by FDIC teams to...

I wrote my annual missive on what bothers me the most about fixing the economy and published it today on the Institutional Risk Analytics website. I'm reprinting it here because I believe it is important that policy makers and presidential hopefuls pay greater attention to these issues. Our...

The City Administrative Officer (CAO) of the City of Los Angeles is proposing that Councilman Richard Alarcon's Responsible Banking Ordinance (RBO) be altered and adopted using much-changed implementation criteria from previous versions of the draft legislation.

On Monday November 21, 2011, the Budget and Finance Committee will meet to...

The politics of California are a minefield of self interests. Very few laws get passed here that, when examined in detail, do not lead back to someone hoping to make a mint by creating a monopoly advantage for a product or patent to lock competitors out of the market under...

One of the sad things about the state of the U.S. economic engine as it sits with the gearbox in neutral is that we seem unable to break so many bad habits. For decades, we have exported jobs by outsourcing first manufacturing and then services gaining cheap goods by ultimately...

The City of Los Angeles talks a great game about the "love in at the park" of its version of the Occupy movement. But clearly the old guard apparatus isn't yielding ground as fast as the rhetoric. I find it interesting that the city's administrators are implying the

What's happened to the Great Society? We've got a stagnant industrial economy where the unemployment rate among our youngest and oldest members of our workforce is dangerously high coupled with a financial system whose mark to market can best be described using the Mickey Mouse term "Imagineering". Our equities markets...

We received the 1st Quarter of 2011 research dataset from the FDIC at Institutional Risk Analytics yesterday. The computers churned the data overnight so our customers could begin to look at the surveillance analytics for their banks of interest this morning. I've been staring at the summary statistics...

What if too big to fail wasn't? What would you do? The U.S. economy's deposits, assets and risk instruments remain concentrated in a very small number of large institutions. What if one of them, just one of them collapsed? This is the question that keeps bank regulators and bank executives...