A new Federal Reserve inquiry into the 2023 collapse of Silicon Valley Bank found that bank-supervision staff in the Biden era could have anticipated and prevented the bank's failure, said Michelle Bowman, the Trump ally who now leads the Fed's bank supervision.

Bowman, speaking at a gathering in London, laid out the initial findings of a report that she commissioned. It found that as early as a year before SVB's failure, Fed regulators "knew, or should have known" about the risks brewing at the bank, but didn't make a prompt intervention, she said.

Some at the Fed have been uneasy about the report. They fear its findings could be used by the White House as grounds to fire Bowman's predecessor, Biden appointee Michael Barr. Though he is no longer the Fed's top regulator, he remains on the seven-member board of governors.

Over the past three years, what went wrong with the Fed's oversight of the Northern California lender has been a hot-button issue at the central bank, whose regulatory role in the financial system is more exposed to the winds of politics than its setting of monetary policy.

Barr, a staunch advocate for stricter regulation of banks, held what is now Bowman's position when SVB failed. Days later, then-Fed Chair Jerome Powell tapped Barr to publish a review of the episode within weeks. In addition to flagging the Fed's own shortcomings, that report pinned much of the blame on the bank's executives and on a shift toward laxer regulatory policy.

Bowman on Friday said that a cautious culture inside the Fed's regulatory staff hampered the group from moving faster. "Staff believed it was personally safer to take no action unless they were certain the action was exactly right," she said, according to a published text of her remarks. Bowman didn't say whether or when the full report would be made public.

In some ways, the new report's findings overlap with Barr's report. Both investigations agreed that SVB failed after unrealized losses on its portfolio of securities caused financial distress for the bank that its executives weren't prepared to handle.

The Barr report also described a risk-averse culture in which supervisors waited "to form ironclad assessments" that created a "hesitancy to move decisively."

In 2025, Barr resigned from his role as the Fed's chief bank regulator just before President Trump returned to office. That move was meant to help him avoid a potential legal fight over whether Trump had the power to fire him. Trump appointed Bowman to be the Fed's top bank regulator last year.

In the job, Bowman has advocated for paring back some of what she and many in the Trump administration view as overburdensome bank regulation that was put in place after the 2008 financial crisis. She has cut the Federal Reserve Board's staff of bank supervisors by about 30%.