Guaranty Bank belly up

Regulators on Friday shut down Guaranty Bank in the 10th-largest U.S. bank failure in history.

All of Guaranty’s assets, including four Valley branches, were bought by Spain’s second-largest bank, the first foreign bank to buy a failed U.S. bank.

Beginning today, all of Guaranty’s branches are expected to be rebranded BBVA Compass, the U.S. division of Banco Bilbao Vizcaya Argentaria SA.

That puts BBVA Compass in the Valley for the first time. The bank has been growing in the Southeast and already had 59 branches in California.

BBVA Compass announced Friday night that banks it acquired would maintain normal hours, including today. All four Guaranty branches in the Valley — in Fresno (on Shaw Avenue near Fig Garden Village), Clovis (at Clovis and Herndon avenues), Merced and Atwater — are expected to be open today.

BBVA Compass, with 600 branches from Florida to California, said the acquisition creates the 15th-largest commercial bank in the U.S., with about $49 billion in deposits.

Guaranty was a big lender felled by losses on loans to homebuilders and other borrowers. The bank also suffered losses on mortgage-linked securities it bought from other banks.

Guaranty, whose parent company was Guaranty Financial Group Inc., had 162 branches in Texas and California. Its failure is expected to cost the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. an estimated $3 billion.

Three banks in Georgia and Alabama also failed Friday, bringing to 81 the number of U.S. bank failures in 2009, a mounting toll and the most in a year since 1992 at the height of the savings-and-loan crisis.