By Anthony Morabith, Missourinet
JEFFERSON CITY – The head of the Missouri Bankers Association is reassuring Missouri residents that banks in the state are safe, reliable, and stable. Jackson Hataway addresses that concern following the closures of Silicon Valley Bank in California and Signature Bank in New York.
“All of the banks here are incredibly safe, sound, and liquid,” he said. “We’ve seen banks that have actually grown over the course of the past few weeks as they’ve helped their customers navigate any concerns they might have about the banking system, about their funds. The most important thing for people to remember is the most sound, stable, and safe place for your funds is an FDIC insured banking institution.”
Hataway explained that banks in Missouri and across the Midwest remain the healthiest and strongest they ever have been, while adding that the closed banks had investments in volatile sectors like cryptocurrencies. Missouri’s banks, he said, support a multitude of sectors, preventing a catastrophe like that from happening here.
Hataway explained that banks across the U.S., including in Missouri, could be required to cover the cost of the failure of those banks through charged special assessment fees.
“We don’t know what the dollar amount will be, and we’ll certainly be advocating for a really close look at the best way to levy any special assessment and offset unfair risk or unfair payments by Missouri institutions where possible,” he said. “That’s, of course, going to be a matter that’s going to ensure, involve analysis of existing statutes that we’ll certainly be making the point that Missouri banks are far removed from the events of Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank.”
But in the age of inflation, rising interest rates, and banks closing, Hataway reassures Missourians of the stability of their local banking institution.
“Banks have a lot of ways to manage the cost structure of the investment portfolios they have,” according to Hataway. “That’s part of what made Signature and Silicon Valley Banks so unique. We really have a lot of risk modeling and interest rate risk modeling, in particular, for banks to help navigate those environments and look ahead and see what happens if rates go up or go down and then they make decisions based on that that are much more sound than the decisions we’ve seen out of Silicon Valley Bank.”
The recent bank closures mark the first in nearly three years, which Hataway said is due to the resilience of your neighborhood banking institution.