Matt Levine’s Money Stuff: To Buy a Bank, You Have to Be a Bank

Shelf charter

The cheapest way to get into the banking business might be to buy a failed bank. When the US Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. takes over a failed bank, it tries to find a buyer, and buying a bank from the FDIC has some attractive features. For one thing, you get a bank, with a brand name and customer relationships and branches and stuff; building all of that from scratch would take you a lot of time and money. You get it cheap, probably, because it failed. And, critically, you don’t buy the whole bank; you get to pick ...