Risk

Industry Bancshares has been bogged down for years with unrealized losses. The Federal Reserve issued a cease-and-desist order against the firm, following similar actions by other agencies.

Huge portfolios of outstanding private credit, issued by lenders completely free of banklike supervision and safety and soundness requirements, are almost certainly of lower quality than banks' loan portfolios. If they implode, the damage could be extensive.

Every time we revise bank capital rules, we uncover new flaws that leave banks unprepared for unexpected stress events.

As long as fraud-prevention efforts remain siloed and bank-specific, perpetrators remain free to employ the same strategies over and over. Banks need to do a better job of sharing information and collaborating.

An uptick in fines associated with anti-money-laundering failures demonstrates that U.S. banks still have much work to do in terms of optimizing their internal systems to identify and stop the flow of dirty money.

Banks are not likely to see their regulatory capital requirements decline any time soon. But the way capital levels are calculated could be made more reflective of real risks.

The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. and Texas banking regulators issued consent orders against Industry State Bank, Fayetteville Bank and Citizens State Bank, requiring major overhauls of their management, capital and risk controls.

There is a tendency to assume that banks carrying a large commercial real estate loan portfolio need to diversify. But that ignores the fact that many of those institutions have much deeper knowledge of the market than their critics.

A new academic paper dives into the key factors that have caused bank failures over the past 160 years.

As the commercial real estate industry sputters along, lenders, investors and analysts are putting less stock in loan-to-value ratios, a longtime bellwether of risk.

Tim Ryan, who joined the megabank in June, will work with COO Anand Selva to oversee enhancements to Citigroup's data integrity systems, according to a memo.

Independence Bank of Kentucky said 14 customers had reported receiving the bills, which included text such as "for motion picture purposes."

The regional bank has already seen a large reduction in "criticized" loans, and it expects that trend to pick up as lower borrowing costs alleviate the pain in the commercial real estate sector.

Prophecies about a wave of bank failures caused by sickly CRE loans haven't yet come true. But there are still plenty of caution signs in a saga that will take years to play out.

The Canadian bank expects to spend more than $3 billion on U.S. regulatory penalties in connection with its anti-money-laundering problems. "It's easy in a bank of our size to sometimes not look at accountabilities as clearly as we should," CEO Bharat Masrani said.