Investors Ease Strain on F.D.I.C.

After contending with nearly 240 bank failures since the financial crisis struck, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation is finally getting some help from private investors. A spate of recent banking takeovers and investments suggests that stronger financial institutions and private investment firms see value in the detritus of American banking. That is good news for the F.D.I.C., which has had to shoulder the cost of failures through its deposit insurance fund, causing the fund to sink into the red. “We are seeing light at the end of the tunnel,” Sheila C. Bair, the head of the F.D.I.C., said in a recent interview. Now that some troubled banks are being taken over by private investors, rather than closed by the government, the pressure on the F.D.I.C. is beginning to ease. On Thursday, the agency, which administers the fund protecting savers’ deposits, is expected to announce that it lowered the amount of money it set aside to cover future losses by more than $3 billion during the first quarter — the first reduction since the second quarter of 2007.

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