Surprise, surprise

Another Friday, another bank failure. The credit bear has already picked off the puny members of the herd... now he's after bigger game.

Regulators on Friday shut down Colonial BancGroup Inc., a big lender in real estate development that marked the biggest U.S. bank failure this year, and a small bank in Pennsylvania.

The closures boosted to 74 the number of federally insured banks that have failed in 2009.

And we may just be getting warmed up:

Missed payments by consumers, builders and small businesses pushed 72 lenders into failure this year, the most since 1992. More collapses may lie ahead as the recession causes increased defaults and swells the confidential U.S. list of “problem banks,” which stood at 305 in the first quarter.

Excluding the stress-test list, banks with nonperformers above 5 percent had combined deposits of $193 billion, according to Bloomberg data. That’s almost 15 times the size of the FDIC’s deposit insurance fund at the end of the first quarter.

But don't worry... the Feds can always print more money to cover your deposits, right?