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Vol. 71/No. 8      February 26, 2007

 
Bank in Pittsburgh fails,
first in United States since 2004
 
BY BRIAN WILLIAMS  
The Metropolitan Savings Bank of Pittsburgh was closed February 2 by the Pennsylvania Department of Banking. This is the first bank failure in the United States since 2004.

The bank had about $15.8 million in assets as of last September. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), which insured the bank's assets, was designated the receiver. FDIC then handed about $12 million of the failed bank's insured deposits over to the Allegheny Valley Bank of Pittsburgh. About $1.2 million in Metropolitan Savings deposits in 70 accounts exceeded the FDIC's insurance limit of $100,000.

Metropolitan Savings failed due to the fact that "the capital of the bank has been significantly impaired, that the bank is operating in an unsafe and unsound condition to transact business, and that the bank is likely to be unable to pay its obligations or meet its depositors’ demands in the normal course of business," a spokeswoman for state banking regulators told Reuters.

The last bank to fail was Utah's bank of Ephraim in June 2004. The last major U.S. bank failure occurred in July 2001 when Superior Bank in Chicago, which had about $1.8 billion in assets, was closed.  
 
 
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