A year since California’s Silicon Valley Bank collapsed, triggering a mini banking crisis, regional lenders in the US are battling another brewing crisis in the commercial real estate market. Worried supervisors are taking no chances this time around. Vice-chair for supervision, Michael Barr, shared the Federal Reserve’s direction of travel in a speech to the Columbia Law School annual banking conference in February. The writing is on the wall for regional banks: more scrutiny, more supervision, more rules.
Since the fall of SVB, the Fed has kept closer tabs on firms with assets of between $10bn and $100bn, particularly large and more complex regional banking organisations that are growing rapidly.