This 42 percent decline in the number of banking organizations was due in part, but only in part, to the large number of bank failures in the late 1980s and early 1990s. A more important factor was mergers among healthy banks. Since the early 1980s, it has not been unusual to see 400 or more mergers among healthy banks each year.
The structure of the market has changed noticeably after the events of recent years. Some of the dynamics that have emerged from the crisis may continue to shape the bond market in the future. I have highlighted three here today:   First, the relative growth of deposits and credit may be quite different from that observed over the previous fifteen years.