Sky Blog
On April 7, 2026, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell convened an urgent, closed-door meeting with the CEOs of some of the nation’s largest banks to discuss the cybersecurity risks posed by Anthropic’s newly announced AI …
Silicon Valley Bank’s failure exposed many familiar weaknesses: uninsured deposits, interest-rate risk, a concentrated depositor base, and weak interest-rate hedging. But the more revealing lesson lies one layer deeper. The supervisory failure was not simply that regulators missed red flags …
On March 25, 2026, the Financial Stability Oversight Council (the “Council”) unanimously voted to propose amendments to its interpretive guidance (the “Proposed Interpretive Guidance”) regarding the designation of nonbank financial companies as “systemically important financial institutions” (“SIFIs”) for supervision by …
Banking organizations must ensure that a tokenized security confers identical legal rights as its non-tokenized counterpart to qualify for the same capital treatment as the non-tokenized form of the security, according to new guidance from the federal banking agencies.
The environment has never been more favorable for existing banking organizations launching a digital asset business and those Fintech and other nonbank companies considering acquiring or chartering a full-service or limited-purpose bank in order to operate a digital asset business. …
The Federal Reserve and FDIC took actions last week designed to facilitate crypto-related activities. The Federal Reserve rescinded its anti-crypto 2023 policy statement and replaced it with a more permissive stance designed to facilitate innovation, and requested information on a …
Today [December 11] the Financial Stability Oversight Council (FSOC) received a briefing from Treasury staff on potential revisions to the Council’s interpretative guidance regarding nonbank financial company determinations. And I was especially encouraged to see revising the non-bank designation guidance …
Key Points:
On November 18, 2025, the Federal Reserve released a Statement of Supervisory Operating Principles that sets out changes to how Federal Reserve examiners should supervise banking organizations. The Statement translates Vice Chair for Supervision Michelle Bowman’s stated priorities into concrete …
On October 24, 2025, the Federal Reserve Board issued two proposals to revise its supervisory stress testing framework.
On October 15, Travis Hill, Acting Chairman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (who has been nominated to permanently lead the agency) delivered a speech titled “Resolution Readiness and Lessons Learned from Recent Large Bank Failures” at the EU Single …
Most industry and academic discussion about the Fed focuses, as is appropriate, on the Federal Reserve Board of Governors’ role in managing monetary policy and, in particular, its tools for managing interest rates and inflation in the shadow of tariffs …
The U.S. Federal Reserve is 12 banks, not one. Each serves a different region of the country and brings insights from that region into the process of formulating nationwide monetary policy. Each also provides a variety of banking services to …
In April 2025, the landscape of U.S. crypto regulation shifted significantly. Three of the country’s principal bank regulators – the Federal Reserve, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) – jointly …
New bank formation in the United States is at an all-time low, and Americans increasingly rely on non-bank financial technology companies (fintechs) to satisfy their financial services needs. Fintechs that do not operate through banks mostly operate outside the direct …
I teach a course on “Financial Crises/Regulatory Responses” with the economist Patrick Bolton. This course addresses the struggle to establish and maintain financial stability, an apex goal of the financial system. Last week, I told the students that by the …
The announcement by Denver-based FirstSun Capital Bancorp and Seattle-based HomeStreet, Inc. on October 29 that the Federal Reserve and the Texas Department of Banking had asked them to withdraw their applications for approval of their pending merger illustrates the potential …
Year after year, the world’s activist-investor community meets at the Active-Passive Investor Summit, the premier shareholder activist conference in New York City, organized by research and advisory service 13D Monitor. Yet at this year’s gathering, on October 22, the mood …
The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) recently proposed and published a Federal Register notice for a proposed rule that would revise the agency’s Change in Bank Control Act (CIBCA) regulations. Specifically, the proposed rule would add a second layer …
On July 25, 2024, the U.S. prudential bank regulators released a Joint Statement on Banks’ Arrangements With Third Parties To Deliver Bank Deposit Products and Services (Joint Statement),1 along with a request for information on bank-fintech arrangements (RFI) issued …