Something a little closer to home for me because there are quite a few branches in my area. With $25 billion in assets, the failure is the sixth largest in American history. So we’re not talking about one of the many small banks that’ve collapsed so far in 2009 — we’re talking about front page news.

WASHINGTON (AP) — Regulators on Friday shut down Colonial BancGroup Inc., a big lender in real estate development that marked the biggest U.S. bank failure this year, and a small bank in Pennsylvania.

The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. was appointed receiver of Montgomery, Ala.-based Colonial, with about $25 billion in assets, and Dwelling House Savings and Loan Association, located in Pittsburgh. The agency approved the sale of Colonial’s $20 billion in deposits and about $22 billion of its assets to BB&T Corp., which is based in Winston-Salem, N.C. The failed bank’s 346 branches in Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Nevada and Texas will reopen at the normal times starting on Saturday as offices of BB&T, the FDIC said…

The FDIC estimates that the cost to the deposit insurance fund from the failure of Dwelling House will be $6.8 million. The failure of Colonial is expected to cost the deposit insurance fund an estimated $2.8 billion.

Here’s Colonial’s website if you’re affected by it. Should be interesting to see how the markets react Monday, if at all.