You may have missed Monday’s article in the Wall Street Journal about the 279 US banks that have failed since the Great Recession started.

In one paragraph, the article’s authors try to strike an optimistic note by venturing that “the upside of [bank] failures is that they can represent a healthy cleansing of a sector that grew too fast, with bank assets more than doubling to $13.8 trillion in the decade that ended in 2008.”