Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent stood before a room of lawmakers in late January and made a claim that sounds almost too good to check: a single $1,000 government deposit, left untouched for decades, could grow into roughly half a million dollars by the time a child retires. The number is attached to Trump Accounts, the…

No credit union member has ever lost a penny of federally insured savings, but a credit union failure still upends daily banking for a few days while the money moves. The National Credit Union Administration says insured funds are typically back in members’ hands within about three days of a credit union closing its doors,…

Two long-running supervisory actions against banks came off the books on September 4, when the Federal Reserve Board announced it had closed them: a cease-and-desist order against United Texas Bank in Dallas that had stood since August 2024, and a written agreement tied to the holding companies of Quontic Bank, a consumer-facing online bank based…

On July 10, 2026, federal regulators took over a tiny Kansas City credit union with 1,015 members and $2.4 million in total assets. Seven weeks later, that credit union no longer exists on its own. Its accounts now sit inside a lender with 594,689 members and $9.0 billion in assets — a size difference of…

Walk into a check-cashing store in Laredo or Las Cruces this week with a $1,200 paycheck, and the clerk can no longer just hand you cash. As of September 3, 2026, a federal order requires that business to check your government ID, write down the specific number on it, and report the transaction to a…

The last bank to close its doors in the United States was Tioga-Franklin Savings Bank, a single-branch lender in Philadelphia holding $68 million in deposits. Pennsylvania regulators shut it down on August 21, 2026, and every account moved overnight to a nearby institution with no interruption in service. That was more than two weeks ago.…

Federal regulators shut down a small credit union in the St. Louis suburbs this summer, the kind of local financial institution most people never think about until it fails. The National Credit Union Administration liquidated African Diaspora Federal Credit Union in Saint Ann, Missouri, after finding the institution insolvent and operating in an unsafe and…

When a bank freezes an account, rejects a deposit, or shuts down a customer relationship altogether, the explanation people usually get is nothing at all — a form letter, a dead-end phone call, or a teller who says compliance rules forbid discussing it. On September 2, 2026, five federal financial regulators told banks and credit…

Federal law does not just require banks to report large cash transactions. It separately makes it a crime to deliberately break a cash transaction into smaller pieces specifically to dodge that report — even if the money itself came from a paycheck, a garage sale, or a lifetime of saving under the mattress. The rule…

The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation adopted a rule on August 27, 2026 that lets a bank move far more money through reciprocal deposit networks, arrangements that let one large balance carry full federal deposit insurance even though it runs well past the standard $250,000 coverage limit that applies to any single account at any single…