On Friday, federal regulators shut down Partners Bank in Florida. With that, bank closings for 2009 have reached 100.

The U.S. giant airplane maker Boeing and banks such as Morgan Stanley and Wells Fargo are the focus of the U.S. morning market. They are likely to be the main movers and shakers of of today's stock market.

The cost of funding and lending may remain high for a while say Australian Banks. The story published in today's The Age reports that the elevation of the banking funding costs may well go through next year.

Bank of America CEO Kenneth Lewis informed the bank’s board today that he has decided to retire. The board accepted his decision but did not name a successor. Lewis,62, has been under tremendous pressure since Bank of America merged with Merrill Lynch in early 2009.

How's this for irony? The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, which comes into play when a bank fails and insures the funds of the customers of said bank, may be requesting its own bailout, from banks.

Arthur Levitt, who is a board member of Bloomberg says "Too big too fail" approach toward banks is a cancer, eating our economy. He said Paulson was right to let Lehman Brother to fail. If he kept Lehman, he would have needed to keep bank.

U.S. Bancorp CEO Richard Davis says demand for loans is lower than the bank's appetite to lend, which turns the conventional wisdom on its head.

In the midst of this horrific recession, we certainly do not need additional bad news. That said, a second wave of debt has been theorized as a coming storm by some economists: credit card debt. Yet, some banks are proactively beginning to work with their cardholders, to stem another debt-related crash, similar to the mortgage mess. Seems that the banks themselves are doing the business of debt consolidation.

The website of First Commonwealth Bank fcbanking was not available for the customers for a little while this morning and just now the service was restored. At this point its not known what has caused the Fcbanking.com outage.

FBI releases bank crime statistics for the second quarter of 2009, which shows 1,278 robberies of financial institutions.

Colonial BancGroup Inc. became the largest bank failure this year after the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation seized the struggling Alabama-based lender Friday and sold it to BB&T Corp.

WSJ, siting the statement to investors by the Bank of America CEO Ken Lewis, says that the bank is looking to close the ten percent of its U.S. Branches as a reflection of the current economic activities. The list of the Bank of America branch closings is not public yet.