The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. last month ratcheted up its pressure on AmericanWest Bancorp., giving the Spokane-based company 30 days—or until Sunday, March 28—to correct its lingering capital deficiencies.

AmericanWest CEO Patrick Rusnak says the bank holding company won't be able to meet that deadline, but he expects the FDIC to allow the deadline to pass, as it has done in other cases, because AmericanWest is in the midst of discussions with investors who might help it to recapitalize.

"We're working as fast as we can," Rusnak says, but not frantically out of concern that failure to meet the fast-approaching deadline necessarily will cause the FDIC to step in and take control of the bank. He adds confidently, "We're going to have continued time."

The financial advisers the company has retained and the investors they're courting are aware of the new deadline the FDIC has imposed, he says. Yet, they're confident enough that the regulatory agency won't hold strictly to that date, and some of the prospective investors will be in town this weekend to do further analysis of the bank.

AmericanWest, whose main operating subsidiary is AmericanWest Bank, said in the 10-K annual report it filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on March 4 that the FDIC six days earlier, on Feb. 26, had issued what's called a supervisory prompt corrective action directive, or PCA directive for short. The directive said a capital restoration plan the bank had submitted last July was unacceptable, and it gave the bank until this weekend to sell its securities or obligations so that it would be capitalized adequately, or to accept an offer to be acquired by or combine with another financial institution.

Rusnak says, though, that he doesn't view the deadline any differently than one set by regulators for last September, when AmericanWest was unable to meet a mandated timetable for raising its capital levels to prescribed standards.

The company announced later last year that it expected its regulatory capital ratios to improve significantly—though still not fully to a level considered to be well capitalized—as the result of a new law that extends the federal income tax carryback period for net operating losses to five years from two years in certain circumstances. Regulators use the capital ratios to ensure banks can absorb a reasonable level of losses before becoming insolvent.

Rusnak says he regards the PCA directive issued by the FDIC last month as "another step in their regulatory supervisory process" designed to show that the agency is keeping close tabs on the bank and pushing it hard to resolve its capital shortfall.

As for the FDIC's ruling that a former capital restoration plan developed by the bank was unacceptable, he says that obviously is the case from the perspective that "the only capital restoration plan in terms of whether one is successful is getting capital," and AmericanWest hasn't accomplished that yet.

"I think regulators are trying to exert as much pressure as they can, and preserve a supervisory record" showing proper oversight, while at the same time trying to accommodate the bank's ongoing recapitalization efforts if those efforts are showing progress, Rusnak says.

He says the FDIC didn't issue PCA directives at all to the vast majority of banks that have failed since the economic downturn began.

It has seemed to use them most often in the western U.S., though with widely varying allowances—about nine months, in one case he's aware of—from the directives' standard 30-day deadline, he adds.

"I've lived and breathed capital restoration every minute of every day. I view it more in the doing than the writing of the plan," Rusnak says, adding he expects to stay focused on that goal—deadlines aside—until a recapitalization plan is completed.