Starling Advisory Group conducted the outside look-back, and Fed Vice Chair for Supervision Michelle Bowman unveiled the conclusions in a Friday speech in London. The takeaway was blunt: supervisors "knew, or should have known" the bank was vulnerable before things broke.
The sequence is familiar but important. In March 2023, SVB told investors it had taken a $1.8 billion hit on securities it sold and that it needed more capital. Its sizable stash of U.S. Treasuries had dropped in value after the Fed started lifting interest rates. On top of that, deposits were "94 percent uninsured and concentrated in venture capital-backed technology companies," Bowman said the review found.
As withdrawals spiked, the Fed and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation acted to shut the bank and safeguard depositors via insurance. Back in 2023, the Fed's top supervisor at the time, Vice Chair for Supervision Michael Barr, produced an internal review that judged staff had been too cautious in their response. The fresh outside assessment goes further, stating supervisors knew, or ought to have known, about the dangers in advance.
Barr exited the supervisory role in February 2025 to let President Donald Trump choose a new chief bank regulator at the Fed. Trump selected Bowman, and the Senate confirmed her. Bowman's remarks did not name Barr, but the findings are likely to fuel new scrutiny of his role.
The Fed's press office did not immediately return a phone call seeking a response to the new report. Having previously called the Fed's board "hostile" to him, Trump could, in the view of some analysts, be spurred by the report to try to oust Barr from his governorship.
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One lesson here: oversight can miss obvious red flags, and politics can reshape who sets the guardrails. That mix can affect how forcefully regulators move the next time a bank stumbles and how markets price the risk across financial names you own.
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