Small Wyoming bank fails
The closure of Bank of Wyoming brings this year's total number of failed banks to 53 -- more than double the number of institutions that failed in all of 2008.
NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- Bank of Wyoming was closed Friday by state regulators, bringing the total number of failed banks this year to 53, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation said.
The Thermopolis, Wyo.-based bank has just one branch, which will reopen Monday as a branch of Central Bank & Trust, which is based in Lander, Wyoming. It was the first bank in that state to fail this year.
Central Bank & Trust agreed to assume all of Bank of Wyoming's $67 million in deposits and purchase $55 million of the failed bank's $70 million in assets. The remaining assets will be sold later by the FDIC.
The failed bank had about $8 million in brokered deposits, which the FDIC said it will pay directly to the brokers.
Today's failure will cost the FDIC $27 million, bringing the FDIC fund's total cost for failed banks to $12.33 billion this year. That compares with $17.6 billion in all of 2008.
The number of bank failures so far this year has more than doubled last year's total of 25, with an average of nearly 9 failures per month.
Over the next 5 years, the FDIC expects to incur roughly $70 billion in losses due to the failure of insured institutions.
Most of the banks that have failed so far this year were casualties of risky funding strategies, as well as losses on loans issued to local residential and commercial real estate developers, who were hit hard by the flagging economy. 
