An Interaction-Aware Decision Framework for FDIC-Assisted Distressed Bank Acquisitions: Empirical Evidence from the FDIC Failed-Bank Panel and the SVB-First Citizens Case

Acquirers of failed banks weigh acquisition value, regulatory protection, risk, buyer strength, and execution difficulty jointly, because each signal's meaning depends on the others: high non-performing loans matter less when government loss sharing absorbs the losses. The proposed Spider Network Filtering Framework encodes such dependencies as four interpretable interaction rules among five dimensions, yielding graph-inspired features for a logistic model and a Pursue/Caution/Avoid decision rule. We evaluate it on 55 acquisitions assisted by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation in 2008-2024 by acquirers with a parent listed in the United States. Six financial inputs come from regulatory reports published before each failure; two deal terms, which the winning bidder knows when it bids but investors learn at the announcement, come from the regulator's press releases. The outcome, a positive three-day abnormal return around the announcement, records the market's initial reception, not realized success. Under grouped, nested cross-validation, the Spider-enhanced model reaches a mean area under the receiver operating characteristic curve of 0.594, against 0.615 for logistic regression on the same inputs and 0.632 for ridge regression; permutation tests that repeat the full model selection give at most weak evidence that any of them ranks better than chance. The Spider score used directly does not rank better than chance, and an apparent link between target distress and higher returns disappears against a bank-sector benchmark. Thresholds tuned for the F1 score approve most acquisitions with negative returns and realize negative utility when each costs three times what a positively received acquisition gains.