Assets of Failed U.S. Banks per Year (FDIC)

## What this measures

The combined total assets of the FDIC-insured institutions that failed in each calendar year, in billions of nominal dollars, from each bank’s last report before failure, dated December 31.

## Why it matters

It shows how big each wave of failures was. A single large failure can make a year with few failures one of the largest on record.

## How to read it

Read it with the count (credit.banks.failures.count_annual). Dollars are nominal and the banking system has grown many times over, so compare with total bank assets when reading across decades.

## What it does not say

Assets are not losses to the insurance fund. Open-bank assistance is not included. Years in which the FDIC’s file lacks the assets of a failed bank are left out rather than understated. Totals can differ slightly from the Quarterly Banking Profile’s.

## How it's built

Sum of QBFASSET (total assets, $ thousands) over failures in the FDIC BankFind failures API, by year of failure, divided by one million.

## Source

Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, BankFind Suite failures API (api.fdic.gov/banks/failures). Public domain (FDIC data catalog, U.S. public domain label). Source: FDIC. Refreshed weekly by /api/cron/credit-banks-sync.