The head of the House Financial Services Committee said Wednesday that his panel “has a very important role to play” discovering what went wrong at Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank in the leadup to the failures of those institutions earlier this month.
“The Federal Reserve announced that Vice Chair of Supervision, Mr. [Michael] Barr, will conduct a review of the supervision and regulation of these failed banks, and I welcome that,” he told a conference staged by the American Bankers Association, before adding that Congress will play a vital role as an independent observer of potential regulatory failures.
“The House Financial Services Committee will use its oversight authority to get to the bottom of what led to the failure of these banks,” The North Carolina Republican said.
McHenry added that he hopes to answer whether “regulators were asleep at the wheel” and whether there was “a private-sector solution” to the banks troubles that the Biden administration overlooked because it “allowed its ideological lens to color its judgement.”
McHenry and the top Democrat on the financial services panel, Rep. Maxine Waters of California, announced a bipartisan hearing next Wednesday, featuring Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. Chair Martin Gruenberg, Federal Reserve Vice Chair of Supervision Michael Barr and Treasury Under Secretary for Domestic Finance Nellie Liang.
“We announced [the hearing] in a bipartisan way,” McHenry said, adding that the move contrasts with the way Senate Democrats are handling their investigation into the matter.
Regional bank stocks
KRE,
were under pressure ahead of the Federal Reserve’s interest rate decision Wednesday, as U.S. stocks
SPX,
fell modestly.
