“I don’t think you want to pull out of anything quickly,” he said.

He said the dangers to banks now aren’t the kind of freeze in short-term credit markets that brought the world economy to its knees last fall.

“The failures are no longer liquidity bank runs,” he said. “The bank failures that we’re seeing today are asset quality failures.”

There are still dangers, especially to community and regional banks with heavy loan exposure to residential construction projects tied to the subprime mortgage market. And there’s still the looming possibility that billions of dollars in commercial debt could go bad as offices and retail shops remain empty for lack of business activity.

So far, 89 banks have failed this year, and the FDIC’s list of troubled banks stands at 416.

And Heisler pointed out that the government is not yet talking of ending all of the extraordinary measures it took in the past years. While some banks have paid the government back the TARP funds that were injected directly into banks, a majority—including Bank of America and Citibank—still have not. And the Term Asset-Backed Loan Facility, or TALF, program designed to bring liquidity to the market for securitized commercial debt, remains in place.

“The economy is still very sensitive,” Heisler said. “It’s a slow disengagement. As the patient recovers, you remove more and more of what was keeping the patient up.”

Correction: Portfolio.com originally called Hexagon Securities a private brokerage services firm. It is a credit-focused investment bank and institutional securities firm. The reference is now correct in the story.