American financial institutions will remember 1984 not as the year of Big Brother but as the year of living dangerously. Last week the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation closed down the insolvent University Bank of Wichita, bringing to 76 the number of insured banks that have folded this year. That is the largest crop of bank failures since the Depression year of 1938 but far short of the 4,000 bank collapses in 1933, when Congress set up the FDIC to restore confidence in the financial system.
While FDIC officials were shuttering the failed Kansas bank, regulators from the Federal Savings and...
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