Authors Pam Martens and Russ Martens reported in a Jan. 2 article that the Office of Financial Research (OFR) has just issued a report describing the U.S. banking system as “fragile and uncertain,” and ripe for another crisis. The OFR, they explain, is “the federal agency whose mandate is to keep federal regulators apprised of the true condition of the U.S. banking system.”
The authors note that the OFR report was written by Research Principal Peyton Young and OFR Financial Analyst Tom Doolittle, adding: “In one deeply troubling paragraph, the pair wrote: `Many of the conditions that precipitated the 2023 banking crisis persist. Fair-value losses in bank securities portfolios are still large, deposits continue to decline, bank equities are underperforming, and the higher interest rates that catalyzed the banking crisis in the first place have not abated and may even increase further.”
