There are still 977 banks known to be facing some sort of heightened scrutiny from the FDIC, according to the unofficial problem bank list regularly posted at Calculated Risk.
But the odds are looking better and better that the majority of those banks will get out of trouble before regulators will shut them down.
Take a look at the pace of bank failures for 2011 compared to the last two years.
I had predicted that we’d see more bank failures in 2011 than in 2010, but we’re nowhere near that pace. As CR notes: “In 2008, 25 banks failed, 140 banks failed in 2009, 157 in 2010, and only 90 so far in 2011.”
Georgia still leads the nation in bank failures over that period, but the last one was on November 10th. The FDIC has not shut down any banks since November 18th. We might see some banks shut down on Friday, December 16th, but it’s highly unlikely that any banks will be closed on either the 23rd or the 30th.