You know what's wild? Most people think bank failures are rare, but if you actually dig into the data, there's been a pretty consistent pattern over the last couple decades. I was looking at the historical list of failed banks in the U.S., and the numbers tell a story most people miss.

So here's the thing—between 2000 and 2023, we saw 565 bank failures total. That's roughly 25 per year on average. Sounds like a lot, right? But the distribution is completely uneven. Before 2008, banks were failing at maybe 3-4 per year. Then 2008 hit and everything changed.

From 2008 to 2012, we averaged 93 bank failures annually. Let that sink in. Of all 565 failures in that 23-year span, 82% of them—465 banks—collapsed during those four years alone. The peak was 2010 with 157 failures in a single year. That's insane when you think about it.

Now, the SVB and Signature Bank collapses in March 2023 got massive attention, and for good reason. SVB was the second-largest bank failure in U.S. history, and Signature Bank became the third-largest just two days later. But here's what people don't realize—before SVB failed, we'd gone 867 days without any bank failures at all. That was the second-longest drought since 1933.

The reason these two failures seemed so shocking wasn't just the frequency. It was the scale. SVB had 209 billion in assets. Signature had 110 billion. Compare that to the banks that failed before them—Almena State Bank in 2020 had just 69 million in assets. We're talking about banks that were roughly 2,000 times larger. In 2010, when 157 banks failed, their combined assets were still less than half of what SVB alone held.

Geographically, it's interesting too. California has seen 42 bank failures since 2000—that's where SVB was based. But Georgia and Florida actually lead the list of failed banks by state, accounting for 30% of all failures since 2000. Both states got hammered during the housing crisis from 2008-2012.

One last detail that caught my attention—95% of bank failures happen on Fridays. There's actually strategy behind this. Regulators wait until Friday so they have the whole weekend to settle accounts and liquidate assets before customers start demanding their money Monday morning. It prevents panic and bank runs. Signature Bank failing on a Sunday was the exception to the rule, and it was intentional—regulators were trying to move fast before contagion spread to other institutions.

The broader pattern here is that while bank failures are statistically common when you look at the full list of failed banks over two decades, they cluster around specific crisis periods. The early 2000s were stable, the Great Recession era was catastrophic, and then things settled down again from 2015 onwards. Whether that stability continues or we're heading into another cycle—that's the question everyone should be watching.