The total number of bank failures linked to the financial crisis cannot be revealed without first reporting this: No depositor in an American bank lost a penny to a bank failure. That said, more than 500 banks failed between 2008 and 2015, compared to a total of 25 in the preceding seven years, according to the Federal Reserve of Cleveland. Most were small regional banks, and all were acquired by other banks, along with their depositors' accounts. The biggest failures were not banks in the traditional Main Street sense but investment banks that catered to institutional investors. These notably included Lehman Brothers and Bear Stearns. Lehman Brothers was denied a government bailout and shut its doors. JPMorgan Chase bought the ruins of Bear Stearns on the cheap. As for the biggest of the big banks, including JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, Bank of American, and Morgan Stanley, all were, famously, "too big to fail." They took the bailout money, repaid it to the government, and emerged bigger than ever after the recession.