Preventing disclosure is a sure sign that banks’ problem assets and losses are mounting. The same thing happened back in the 2007-2009 financial crisis. From Wolf Richter at wolfstreet.com:
Are disclosures of “unrealized losses” on bank balance sheets next?
Acting Chairman of the FDIC Board of Directors, Travis Hill, who was sworn in as FDIC Vice Chairman on January 5, released a statement today, along with the materials of the quarterly report by the FDIC on the FDIC-insured banks, that the FDIC would no longer disclose as of today the total assets on its “Problem Bank List.”
The list had previously shown total assets and the total number of banks on the Problem Bank List. As of today, it only shows total number of banks on the Problem Bank List, forget the assets.
This sudden end of the disclosure is a problem because a jump in assets on the list used to indicate that a bigger bank had gotten on the list, something we’d need to start paying attention to, and now we don’t know if a bigger bank has gotten on the list. We just see the total number – 66 banks in Q4 2024, according to the FDIC today. This is what the FDIC’s chart used to look like through Q3 2024.
In the chart above, by jump in the gold columns in Q4 2021, we could tell that a bigger bank had gotten on the Problem Bank List as assets of Problem Banks spiked. Then, in 2022 SVB went to hell for all to see and finally imploded in Q1 2023, followed by ultimately two other banks. We didn’t know which banks had gotten on the list, but we knew something was going on with one or more bigger banks. And people guessed rightly or wrongly. Now we won’t see that anymore.
