More Bank Failures
Pacific Western Bank of San Diego is picking up 11 new California branches north of LA and $770 million in fresh deposits following the failure of Los Padres Bank in Solvang, California.
As part of the deal, Pacific Western Bank has agreed to purchase essentially all of Los Padres’ assets (loans) of $870.4 million. The FDIC will assume up to 80 percent of the losses on most of Los Padres’ bad mortgages and commercial loans.
Also included in the acquisition was the Harrington Wealth Management subsidiary of Los Padres Bank, headquartered in Fishers, Indiana, which provides trust and investment management services to individuals and institutional clients.
Los Padres was another casualty of the bursting of the housing bubble and overleveraged mortgage-backed securities markets.
Federal bank regulators slapped Los Padres with a cease-and-desist order last year after the bank was deemed to be insufficiently capitalized.
The bank was a sinking ship, but it struggled to stay afloat by jettisoning bad loans and securities overboard and praying for better times ahead that never arrived.
Los Padres wasn’t the only victim of Friday’s bank failures. Rabobank, a Dutch bank that is one of the world’s biggest, is using its toehold in El Centro to expand even further into California by acquiring 23 branches and deposits totaling $777 million from two failed banks in Chico and Stockton.