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In 2008, 25 banks failed. In 2009, the number rocketed to 140. The odds your bank failed last year are 1 in 58.54. Those are roughly the odds that a person lives in Minnesota (1 in 58.24).

If 140 seems like a lot—and even one can seem like a lot when it happens to be your bank—then consider this: in 1992, 179 banks failed across the US, according to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, or FDIC. And that doesn’t even touch the year with the most bank failures: 1989.

In that year, the US was experiencing the very worst of the savings-and-loan crisis of the 1980’s. Savings & Loans (“thrifts” or S&L’s) are institutions that accept savings funds and make loans against those funds to individuals for houses, cars, and what have you. S&L’s had been deregulated in the early 1980’s by the US government, for fear that high interest rates would weaken the housing market. After being deregulated, S&L’s grew out of proportion to their holdings, the economy experienced a huge crisis, and the bubble of the 1980’s burst.

In 1989, banks failed at a rate of one every 16.5 hours. Of the 531 failures, 221 took place in Texas.

The rate of bank failures in 2009 is pretty tame by these standards. By other standards, of course, it is not—for instance, 2009 saw more banks close than any year between 1934 and 1942, the doldrums of the Great Depression and first years of the FDIC’s existence. But 2009 also has lower unemployment, and no farming crisis, no Dust Bowl. Economics are a cell of complexity: different organelles may fail in different ways, at different times. Housing happens to be a common denominator in the economic crises of the last 40 years.

In some especially prosperous years, by the way, bank failures can be few to none. Recently, in the years 2005 and 2006, the FDIC records no banks having failed at all; the only two years in which the FDIC has ever recorded no failures. That makes the bank-failure odds for those two years 0 in 0.

But 2009 was another story. In October, the FDIC announced it was over 8 billion dollars in the red, the first time the insurance fund has been in negative territory since the bad old days of the early nineties. But the good news is Texas bankers have learned their lesson. Only 5 banks in the Lone Star state have failed in 2009, and Texas banks now have stronger reserves than the nationwide average. The dubious distinction of topping the list for bank failures currently belongs to Georgia, with 25—representing nearly 18% of all failures in 2009.