Nobody Wants to Be a Bank Examiner Anymore
Staffing woes threaten the ability of financial watchdogs to address crises.
Illustration: Anna Haifisch for Bloomberg Businessweek
The top US financial regulators last summer rolled out a raft of proposed rules aimed at preventing another round of bank failures and industry turmoil. But those efforts won’t hold if the agencies can’t bolster the ranks of frontline examiners.
The Federal Reserve and Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. are struggling to hire bank examiners and retain the veterans. Fed supervision staff shrank 3% last year from 2016, even as commercial lenders’ assets surged more than 40%, to roughly $22 trillion. At the FDIC, more than a third of the agency’s risk-management employees will be eligible to retire by 2027, up from 18% in 2022. Resignations among its examiners-in-training in the past two years occurred at rates greater than before the pandemic.