Regional banks shouldn’t be the only source of worry for potential fallout from the Federal Reserve’s rapid pace of interest-rate hikes in the past year, said a former top banking regulator. “I don’t see regional banks as having any particular problem,” said Sheila Bair, who ran the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. from 2006 to 2011, in an interview with MarketWatch on Thursday. “We need to be mindful of all unmarked securities at banks — small, medium and large.”
Bair called the hyperfocus on regional banks and interest-rate risks “counter productive” in the wake of the collapse earlier in March of Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank
SBNY,
-22.87%
of New York. “This is a risk confronting all banks,” she said. “All examiners need to be on alert for how interest-rate risk is being managed. If there is a run, they will need to sell these securities. Those are the kinds of things all-size banks, and all examiners should be worried about.” A run on deposits at Silicon Valley Bank snowballed after it disclosed a $1.8 billion loss on a sudden sale of $21 billion worth of high-quality, rate-sensitive mortgage and Treasury securities. It was the biggest U.S. bank failure since Washington Mutual’s collapse in 2008. The FDIC estimated that U.S. banks had some $620 billion of unrealized losses from securities on their books as of the end of 2022, including longer-duration Treasurys and mortgage securities that have become worth less than their face value. “Unrealized losses on securities have meaningfully reduced the reported equity capital of the banking industry,” FDIC Chairman Martin Gruenberg said on March 6, in a speech at the Institute of International Bankers. Days after that gathering, Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank both collapsed, prompting regulators to roll o …