The immediate panic around bank runs in the United States may have eased, but the flood of deposits that have exited regional banks over the past year has prompted a tightening of lending standards and raised the odds that the U.S. economy will tip into recession.
For now, at least, that cycle is much less of a concern in Canada.
As of March, overall deposits at U.S. banks shrank 2.4 per cent from the previous year, the steepest decline since the country’s savings and loan crisis in the 1990s.
When regional U.S. banks are drained of deposits by households and businesses worried about the safety of their money or seeking higher interest elsewhere, those banks make fewer loans to buy houses and fund small business. That, in turn, can lead to a credit crunch and recession.
The picture in Canada is different, with deposits continuing to rise, as Stephen Brown at Capital Economics noted this week.
While lending to businesses has tightened significantly in the U.S., he wrote, on balance Canadian banks have made loans only marginally more restrictive.
Canada’s banking sector “does not face the same immediate risks as in the U.S., since it is far more concentrated, limiting the chance that problems at small lenders will trigger a broader crisis of confidence,” he wrote.
Still, he warned, “indirect risks” from international bank problems will likely lead Canadian banks to be more cautious in their lending here, “particularly as their U.S. operations come under strain.”
Decoder is a weekly feature that unpacks an important economic chart.