Former SVB Chief Greg Becker Is Set to Testify to Senate on Bank Collapses

(Bloomberg) -- The former chief executive officer of Silicon Valley Bank and the former leaders of Signature Bank are to be among the witnesses at Senate Banking Committee hearings on US bank failures.

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Gregory Becker, who led SVB from 2011 until its collapse in March, is scheduled to testify on May 16. Scott Shay and Eric Howell, the former chair and president of Signature Bank, which also failed in March, are to appear the same day, the committee said in a press release late Tuesday.

Michael Barr, the vice chair for supervision for the US Federal Reserve and Martin Gruenberg, the chair of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., are scheduled to appear on May 18.

Spokespeople for the banks didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment on Tuesday.

The hearings were announced as jitters about the soundness of the US banks continue to ripple through the industry and the broader economy. On Monday, JPMorgan Chase & Co. announced that it would acquire another troubled lender, First Republic Bank.

“We’ve been working to hold these executives accountable for running their banks into the ground,” the committee chair, Sherrod Brown, an Ohio Democrat, said on Twitter.

The hearings come as Barr leads an effort at the Fed to review a range of rules that apply to firms with more than $100 billion in assets, including stress testing and liquidity requirements, following the failures. Senators in both parties have blamed bank executives for taking on excessive risks and regulators for failing to supervise them properly.

Efforts to craft legislation strengthening regulations on banks is unlikely to succeed with most Republicans arguing that supervisors and company management failed, not a 2018 deregulation law they enacted with bipartisan support under President Donald Trump.

Lawmakers in both parties, however, have indicated that they’d like to claw back compensation from Becker and other executives of banks that failed on their watch.

The FDIC on Monday called for sweeping overhaul of deposit insurance after the recent failures partly drained a pool of money the government uses to protect lenders’ clients.

The collapses and the government’s response “raised fundamental questions about the role of deposit insurance in the United States banking system,” Gruenberg said in a statement.

--With assistance from Paige Smith.

(Updates with Brown’s tweet, in sixth paragraph.)

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