Public Savings Bank in Huntingdon Valley shut down

WASHINGTON - Regulators yesterday shuttered a small bank near Philadelphia, boosting to 65 the number of U.S. bank failures this year.

The pace of closures has slowed as the economy has slowly improved and banks work their way through the bad debt accumulated in the Great Recession. By this time last year, regulators had shuttered 118 banks.

The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. seized Public Savings Bank, in Huntingdon Valley, with one branch, $46.8 million in assets and $45.8 million in deposits. Capital Bank, based in Rockville, Md., agreed to assume the assets and deposits of the failed bank.

The failure of Public Savings Bank is expected to cost the deposit insurance fund $11 million.

In all of 2010, regulators seized 157 banks, the most in any year since the savings-and-loan crisis two decades ago. Those failures cost about $21 billion.

In 2009, there were 140 bank failures that cost the insurance fund about $36 billion, a higher price tag than in 2010 because the banks involved were bigger on average. From 2008 through 2010, bank failures cost the fund $76.8 billion. The deposit-insurance fund fell into the red in 2009.

Depositors' money - insured up to $250,000 per account - is not at risk, with the FDIC backed by the government. That insurance cap was made permanent in the financial overhaul law enacted last July.