New regulatory pressures and slow economic growth have been taking their toll on the US's small regional lenders, leading to worries that many of them will be squeezed out of the market. But results from the first quarter of 2014 show that these smaller players are actually performing better than the country's larger lenders.
Since their federal takeover in 2008, the fate of US mortgage underwriters Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac has hung in the balance. Politicians have jostled back and forth on the issue of winding them down, but without any workable and politically agreeable way to fill the void they would leave in the US housing market, it seems that the two institutions may be here to stay.
Over the past two years banks have been hit by a huge wave of litigation relating to residential mortgages, interbank rates, consumer insurance and money laundering. Though lenders have largely managed to absorb the costs fairly easily, it seems that the regulators are not quite finished when it comes to dishing out fines.