San Francisco Fed president: Silicon Valley Bank's failure wasn't our fault

Silicon Valley Bank failed because regulators were far too slow to take action, San Francisco Federal Reserve Bank President Mary Daly said Monday in her first extended remarks about the collapse.

SVB operated in Daly's district before the regional bank's stunningly rapid failure in March, but she noted she doesn't have a supervising role. Instead, she said, other officials waited too long into take decisive regulatory action.

"There's a slowness between when things are spotted and when enforcement actions or other things are taken," Daly said Monday during a moderated discussion hosted by the Brookings Institution in Washington, DC. "We can raise this - and by 'we' I mean the system, not me because again, I don't play an active role in supervision - but raise issues and have deliberations and see."

That slowness was identified as a significant issue in the postmortem report of the failures of SVB, Signature Bank and later First Republic Bank, released in the spring by Michael Barr, the Fed's vice chair for supervision.

But for months, some politicians have tried to identify the specific person or group to blame for the failures, most notably Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren.

"Supervision is a system-wide activity" with the Fed's vice chair of supervision at the helm for policymaking and execution, Daly said, similar to the response Fed Chair Jerome Powell gave last month when Warren asked him the same question.

Daly said the supervisors at the San Francisco Fed simply report issues to the Fed's Board of Governors, which is ultimately responsible for fixing any regulatory issues.