Feb. 15--Friday, long the bright spot for workaday drudges, has morphed into something much different for the struggling banking industry.

As the financial downturn continues to ravage the economy, Friday has become bank failure day. With increasing regularity, Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. shock troops are showing up at bank headquarters Friday afternoons, like so-many grim reapers, taking their scythes to faltering financial institutions.

The bank failure wave hit Oregon this last Friday when the FDIC and the Oregon Division of Finance and Corporate Securities closed the doors of Pinnacle Bank of Beaverton. It was the first bank failure in Oregon since 1991 and the third Pacific Northwest financial institution to bite the dust since September.

Pinnacle was one of four banks across the country to be seized Friday. Twelve federally insured institutions have failed in the first six weeks of this year, compared with 25 in all of 2008.

The body count would be much worse but for the trillions of dollars in loans, loan guarantees and direct injections of cash the U.S. government has given the industry. The U.S. Treasury has made it clear it will go to almost any length to prop up the huge money-center banks for fear of what the failure of a CitiGroup or Bank of America would do to the rest of the economy.

But in the Pacific Northwest, no bank is "too big to fail," as the September demise of mortgage giant Washington Mutual illustrated.

With $72 million in total assets, Pinnacle was a little fish. But some of Oregon's bigger fish are also showing signs of stress. As housing demand remains flat and inventories of unsold homes bulge, banks' portfolios of residential construction and land development loans are hemorrhaging.

That's a decidedly grim development for many Northwest banks, which have as much as a third of their loan portfolios devoted to residential real estate.

The proposition that there were systemic problems in the U.S. banking industry was, not so long ago, dismissed as alarmist hogwash. When Nouriel Roubini, a New York University economics professor, predicted that hundreds of banks could fail by the time the recession eased, he was laughed off as Dr. Doom.

Today, no one's laughing.

"We have a global and national event going on that is unprecedented," said Bob Sznewajs, CEO of West Coast Bancorp of Lake Oswego. "I don't think any of us have ever seen anything like this."

Banks big and small are endangered. Industry analyst RBC Capital Markets predicted on Feb. 10 that 1,000 banks could fail over the next three to five years.