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Federal Reserve Supervision Outreach Resources for Bankers

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Slow, Steady Decline in the Number of U.S. Banks Continues

Bill Emmons 2020

The vast majority of commercial banks that have ever operated in the U.S. have disappeared. Since its all-time high of 30,456 in 1921, the bank population had declined to only 4,377 at the end of 2020, a decline of about 86%. Even since 1934, after the 1933 bank holiday closed thousands of banks and the newly established Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) stabilized the banking system, the bank population has declined by 71%, or 10,973 institutions.

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Banks Navigate Surging Deposits, Tepid Loan Activity since COVID-19 Onset

Carl White

Two years ago, community banks cited the availability and cost of funding as their greatest challenges, according to the Conference of State Bank Supervisors’ 2019 National Survey of Community Banks. Interest rates had recently risen, increasing the cost of deposits and prompting more reliance on wholesale funding.

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The Federal Reserve Offers Community Banks a New Tool to Meet Accounting Change

Carl White

The Federal Reserve recently unveiled a tool to help small community banks—those with less than $1 billion in assets—comply with a new accounting standard they are required to implement by 2023. The standard is the current expected credit loss (CECL) methodology for setting banks’ loan loss allowances, and the tool is called SCALE—the Scaled CECL Allowance for Losses Estimator.


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