including a number of banks with a huge presence in Tennessee, such as First Tennessee, SunTrust, and Regions Bank. They are all still full of TARP money, paying little or no dividend. First Tennessee claims profit this quarter of a penny a share, SunTrust and Regions both lost money in 2009 and neither is realistically expected to make any money in 2010.

A number of smaller community banks in Tennessee have consent orders with FDIC or the OCC to get their house in order and raise additional capital. The smaller community banks will start being sold to larger regional banks this Fall as they simply cannot raise the necessary capital to go forward in this current regulatory environment.

On Friday 6 more banks were closed for a total of 102 this year. See Calculated Risk:
(link...)

Bank failures these days are limited not by the health of the banks, but by the capacity of the Feds to process the takeovers. There are only so many people with the skills to flip an insolvent bank to a new owner over a weekend.

Speaking of broke banks, I wonder if any local media would stick a mike in front of Vic Ashe and get his perspective on the demise of Fannie Mae, he served on their board of directors from 2001 - 2004 and was the first (and probably the last) sitting mayor to reside on the board of Fannie or Freddie. He needed somebody to pay for his travel to and from D.C. The seeds of the destruction of those entities were sown in those years.