By David Lawder
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen will chair a closed meeting of the Financial Stability Oversight Council on Friday morning, according to daily media advisory for the department.
The Treasury statement provided no further details about the subject of the FSOC meeting, which comes two weeks after regulators closed Silicon Valley Bank, whose failure kicked off a bank-run contagion crisis.
The body of financial regulators, led by the Treasury and including the heads of the Federal Reserve, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp (FDIC), the Securities and Exchange Commission and other regulatory agencies, meets regularly to discuss the state of U.S. financial stability risks and oversight initiatives.
The meeting comes as global banking contagion fears again caused bank stocks to fall sharply, with European giants Deutsche Bank and UBS knocked by worries that regulators and central banks have not yet contained the worst shock to the sector since the 2008 global financial crisis.
Yellen again sought to calm fears of further bank deposit runs on Thursday, telling U.S. lawmakers that she was prepared to repeat actions taken in the Silicon Valley and Signature Bank failures to safeguard uninsured bank deposits if failures threatened more deposit runs.
Those actions to invoke “systemic risk exceptions” were taken by Yellen, President Joe Biden, the FDIC, and the Fed, which supervised Silicon Valley and Signature.
Friday’s meeting brings in a much broader pool of regulators, including the heads of the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, which regulates national banks and federal savings associations, as well as of the SEC, the National Credit Union Administration and other agencies.
Much of the body’s work in recent months involves laying the groundwork for new financial regulations aimed at integrating climate change risk management into the regulatory system.
Responding to a Senate hearing question on risks in the non-bank financial sector, Yellen said on Wednesday that the oversight council was working on revised guidance that would restore the body’s capacity to designate non-bank financial institutions as systemically important. The move would subject designated institutions to stronger regulation.
(Reporting by David Lawder; Editing by Chizu Nomiyama and Jonathan Oatis)
