BlackRock Inc. Chief Executive Officer Larry Fink said the banking crisis could worsen beyond the failure of Silicon Valley Bank, worrying aloud about cracks in the financial system that formed during more than a decade of easy money and low interest rates.
“Are the dominoes starting to fall?” said Fink, chairman of the world’s largest asset manager, in a letter on Wednesday. “It’s too early to know how widespread the damage is.”
Fink, 70, said that while regulators’ actions have contained the problem for the moment, the past week’s collapse of Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank recalls past “spectacular financial flameouts,” including the savings and loan crisis in the 1980s and early 1990s and the bankruptcy of Orange County, California, in 1994.
“We don’t know yet whether the consequences of easy money and regulatory changes will cascade throughout the U.S. regional banking sector (akin to the S&L crisis) with more seizures and shutdowns coming,” Fink said. “It ultimately lasted about a decade and more than a thousand thrifts went under.”
(By Silla Brush)
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