They can’t fail -- they’ve got too much of our money

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Too big to fail, quickly defined: The nation’s five biggest banks held 37% of all U.S. bank deposits as of June 30, according to a tally by SNL Financial. (Chart is below.) Compared with a year earlier, Bank of America easily held on to the No. 1 spot, with $907 billion in deposits, or 12% of the U.S. total.

Wells Fargo & Co. ranked No. 2, thanks to its acquisition of Wachovia Corp. last year. Wells had $759 billion in deposits as of June 30, or 10% of the nation’s total.

BofA and Wells also top the list of the biggest banks that haven’t yet repaid all of the taxpayer capital they got under the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) in 2008.

JPMorgan Chase, which took over failed Washington Mutual last year, ranked third in deposits, with 8.5% of the market; Citigroup came in fourth, with 4.2%; and PNC Financial surged to fifth, with 2.4%, up from 16th place a year earlier.

Pittsburgh-based PNC leapfrogged other banks with its purchase of National City Corp. of Cleveland, another casualty of last year’s financial collapse.

‘While the top banks have retained their stronghold on the market, industry consolidation has opened the door for other banks to grab a larger slice of the pie,’ said Kris Niswander, associate director of SNL’s financial institutions group.

‘Our analysis points to large regional and community banks as gaining the most ground in 2009,’ Niswander said.

Total bank deposits reached $7.56 trillion as of June 30, up 7.1% from a year earlier, as Americans socked more away in the relative safety of federally insured accounts.

-- Tom Petruno

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