At the end of the first week in February the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation ordered NextBank to cease operations. NextBank was the first insured Internet bank to go belly up and the 4th insured bank to go under this year. NextBank operated solely on the internet and had no checking or passbook savings accounts. It solicited only CDs in $100,000 amounts, so-called jumbo accounts. The deposits were used to finance the bank's credit card business solicited solely on the Internet. NextBank had $554 million in deposits when it was closed. 2,075 depositors had exceeded the FDIC $100,000 limit and will lose $29.4 Million in NextBank's failure.

The NextBank failure followed less than a week after the collapse of the Oakwood Deposit Bank of Oakwood, Ohio with a loss to its depositors of about $2.9 million in accounts that exceeded the FDIC insurance amount.

The Bank of Sierra Blanco Texas was closed January 18th at a cost to depositors of $720,000 in uninsured deposits. On January 11th the agency closed Hamilton Bank of Miami, Florida with deposits of $1.2 Billion. 3600 accounts exceeded the insured limit by a total of $130 Million.

The string of 4 bank failures in less than a month has been lost in the noise of the ENRON failure just as the fading economy has been lost in the noise of the first phase of the American-Afghani War. The FDIC does not release information as to the cause of a failure. What is clear is that the condition of our banks bear