Nothing is new.

A recent report from the St. Louis Federal Reserve suggests that the current flood of bank failures result from only four problems:

1. An imbalance of risk versus return,
2. Failure to diversify,
3. Offering products and services that bank management doesn’t fully understand,
4. Poor management of risks.

They further suggest that none of these things are anything new. That is, every bank failure from recessions past and present can be explained by one or more of these four factors. As much as we might like to call the current situation "unprecedented" and blame our problems on new fancy financial assets, lack of regulation, bad monetary policy, or bad economic policy from your least favorite politician, maybe it is just a problem of us failing to learn from our past mistakes.

Here's the link:
http://www.stlouisfed.org/newsroom/displayNews.cfm?article=496