Normally, when the FDIC announces a Friday bank failure it has already found a buyer for the insured deposits and assets of the failed institution. Come Monday morning, life goes on as normal for the failed bank's customers, except that their bank's name has changed.

But when New Frontier Bank of Greeley, Colorado, failed last Friday, the FDIC could not find a buyer. Instead it employed a seldom-used power to create its own temporary bank that the FDIC is calling the Deposit Insurance National Bank of Greeley. How rare is this maneuver? The last time the FDIC used the legal provision that allows it to create its own bank was in 1982.

In that case, the FDIC created a bank to process the failure of Oklahoma-based Penn Square. Congress gave the FDIC the power to create its own banks to resolve failed institutions back in 1933, but by 1982 it was used so infrequently that in the preceding 20 years the agency had only created four of them.

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It’s Herb Allison, according to today’s reports, who’ll be moving from the bailed-out Fannie Mae to the bailout command center at the Treasury Department. He’ll be replacing Neel Kashkari, the young Goldman Sachs alum who came to be known as the fresh face of the TARP. Fun fact: Allison, at 65, is thirty years older than Kashkari.

With Allison leaving Fannie, both Fannie and Freddie now lack a permanent CEO. David Moffett, who like Allison was appointed after the government takeover last September, jumped ship at Freddie last month. It seems it’s not a very attractive gig.

Six banks so far have returned money to the Treasury Department, and despite all being healthy enough to afford repayment, they've tended to be a pretty cross lot. Treasury and Congress changed the rules on them, they say, adding new executive compensation limits and threatening tighter restrictions. And then there's the oft-repeated refrain that banks that have taken the money have been painted with the bailout brush when they got the money under a program that was supposed to be for "healthy" banks.

But for vitriol, the CEO of West Virginia's Centra Financial Holdings, takes the cake. Douglas Leech, who also founded the private bank, told the New York Times, "What they did is wrong and fundamentally un-American."

What's he talking about? When Treasury invests in banks, it buys preferred stock that pays a five percent dividend. On top of that, Treasury has been receiving stock warrants to help recoup more taxpayer money. For the most part, those warrants in public companies are "out of the money," i.e. the stock is trading below the price at which Treasury could acquire them. But that doesn't mean they're worthless, since Treasury could hold them for years, when the stock might rise high enough.

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Where is Martin Scorsese when you need him?

The FDIC reports tonight that Cape Fear Bank of Wilmington, North Carolina, has failed. First Federal Savings and Loan of Charleston, South Carolina, assumed the bank's deposits. Those who have money in Cape Fear shouldn't notice much of a change. On Monday, Cape Fear's eight offices will reopen as branches of First Federal.

Cape Fear's failure represents a $131 million ding to the FDIC's federal deposit insurance fund, bringing taxpayers one baby-step closer to a bailout of the fund. The FDIC's fund was at a paltry $18.9 billion to start the year,

the lowest level in nearly a quarter-century. This is the 22nd bank to fail in 2009, according to the FDIC's failed bank list. In all of 2008, 25 banks failed. And in 2007, just three banks went down. The most banks that have failed in any single evening this year has been four but banking analysts expect that there are many more failures to come.

The FDIC likes to close failed banks on Friday evenings to avoid panicked depositers storming the bank's lobby trying to get their deposits out. Usually the announcements for East Coast banks begin around 5:30 p.m. (EST) followed by West Coast banks around 9 p.m. (EST)

The AP is reporting that this is the first bank failure in North Carolina since 1993.

Update: Later Friday night, the FDIC announced the closure of New Frontier Bank in Greeley, Colorado. The bank's history of crappy loans had helped earn it a cease-and-desist order from the FDIC in December, and it had been looking for a buyer, according to the Greeley Tribune. New Frontier Bank's closure cost the FDIC's deposit insurance fund an estimated $670 million. A "material loss" of an FDIC-regulated bank automatically triggers an investigation by the agency's inspector general into what happened and why the FDIC was unable to prevent the failure.