US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen chaired this Friday a meeting of the Financial Stability Oversight Council (FSOC), made up of the heads of the country’s main regulatory bodies.
In a notice to the media, the US Treasury Department announced this meeting in the last few hours, which was not previously scheduled and was held behind closed doors.
The FSOC was created in 2010 during the term of former President Barack Obama (2009-2017) and after the outbreak of the 2008 financial crisis.
Its mission is to monitor the stability of the US financial system. It has ten voting members and five non-voting members.
Among the members who vote are the president of the Federal Reserve (Fed), Jerome Powell; the so-called currency auditor, Michael Hsu; the director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Rohit Chopra, and the chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, Rostin Behnam.
Among the five who do not vote there is a supervisor of the state banks and another of the insurance companies.
Yellen has been sending messages of calm to the markets all week, assuring that the US banking system is solid and that the Government will adopt measures to guarantee savings in the face of the crisis unleashed in recent weeks by the bankruptcy of two banks in the country and the bailout of a third.
The panic also crossed the Atlantic and almost finished with the Swiss bank Credit Suisse, which finally had to be acquired last weekend by its competitor UBS after the crisis of confidence that was sinking its price in the market.
The financial situation of the two US banks that have failed, Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) and Signature Bank, worsened by the Fed’s monetary policy, which has been raising interest rates since March last year to combat inflation.
Thus, the Fed decided to raise rates once again this week, 0.25 points, to place them in a range of between 4.75% and 5%, although Powell did not rule out that the central bank could pause these increases. at your next meeting.
This Friday, the large European banks recorded another day of bulging falls in the stock market dragged down by the decline of more than 10% of the Deutsche Bank after announcing to repay subordinated debt before its maturity.
Wall Street began this Friday in the red and the Dow Jones, its main indicator, lost 0.58%, after the collapse of Deutsche Bank shares reactivated concerns about the banking sector and fear of a possible recession.
EFE
