A government-wide hiring freeze has led the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. to yank job offers to more than 200 new examiners, the front-line employees who closely monitor banks to ensure they operate safely and adhere to an extensive rule book.
The FDIC is already facing a staffing challenge, particularly with a lack of examiners, undermining its ability to reduce the risk of bank failures. A chronic shortage of examiners contributed to the failure of Signature Bank, one of three large banks to collapse in 2023, the agency has said.
Examiners are essentially charged with making sure a bank doesn’t fail, a critical function at the roughly 6,000-employee FDIC, of which roughly 2,300 are examiners. The agency oversees about 4,500 banks around the country, most of them small. It also insures trillions of bank deposits and winds down failing banks. Its work is funded through industry assessments.
Perhaps more significantly, the agency is already in need of additional examiners, with frequent turnover and staffing shortages contributing to major setbacks in recent years. Current and former regulators said they feared the situation could snowball if hiring cuts combine with an uptick in the departures of retirement-eligible employees.
A review of the March 2023 failure of Signature Bank found the supervisory group overseeing large financial institutions in the FDIC’s New York office had average vacancies of about 40 percent. For the six years before Signature’s collapse, the FDIC couldn’t adequately staff the team dedicated to the bank.

About Those Taxes ...
But is direct indexing better than ETFs? Generally they are not, in my view, at least not compared to the best ETFs.
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Typically after a few years, the tax benefit is minimal, and all that is left are fees and complexities. The 1099 tax form on my little $5,000 direct indexing experiment is 86 pages!

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@bee, @stillers, @WABAC, @rforno, . . .
By how much are you reducing or have you reduced your equity allocation from the 2024 peak level?

”If I want to get an opinion, I read it from one of the best in business, David R. Giroux, the guy who runs PRWCX, T. Rowe Price Group Chief Investment Officer, + more who publishes his thoughts a couple of times annually.”
“MFO monthly issue is also a good source for information and insight, and the site has meaningful data for investors.”

"Don't bet against a secular bull market advance!" We're all trained, or brainwashed, if you will, to believe that the next major stock market top is at hand or just around the corner. It completely immobilizes us when it comes to having belief in the major advance at hand. Give us a bit of selling and we'll quickly point out the likely recession and swift stock market drop ahead. Two weeks ago, reigniting inflation was a major concern and the S&P 500 was 5% off its high. Today, we're in all-time high territory after the ACTUAL inflation data said that inflation is NOT a problem. Or we can just be blindfolded and keep tuning into the circus that is CNBC.
Drown out the noise and all the bearish rhetoric, and instead focus on one of my favorite charts. This is a 100-year monthly chart of the S&P 500:....
The next time you think, "is this the start of the next secular bear market?", I want you to remember one thing. There have been TWO starts to secular bear markets in my entire lifetime - the early 1970s and the turn of the century as the dot com bubble popped. That's it. Just stop trying to call the 3rd one. There have only been 14 cyclical bear markets since 1950, which means that, on average, we see only one of these lesser bear markets every 5-6 years. Since 2018, we've had 3 of them (2018, 2020, 2022). That's waaaaay more than our fair share. Let the bulls do their thing.
If you look back above to the 100-year chart, you'll see that the S&P 500's monthly PPO is accelerating to the upside, telling us that long-term bullish momentum just keeps building. Bear markets don't begin until that monthly PPO moves into negative territory.

Look at who are predicting 6500 - 4 of 5 largest market participating banks. That is 6.5% from here. Probably easier to make that much with reasonably comfortable bond funds.
David Giroux’s 5300 is a 14% drop from here. So many members of this forum are invested heavily with David.
Thanks @bee and @stillers.
@bee, @stillers, @WABAC, @rforno, . . .
By how much are you reducing or have you reduced your equity allocation from the 2024 peak level?

A very quick look shows that
VIX(SP500 SD) < 15
MOVE(treasury SD)=87=low
SP500 is in an uptrend.
I don't need to check beyond that.
My big picture = "normal" market = I'm invested at 99+% for several months now.

but you're invested 99+% in bonds, not the SP500, and in "special" bonds that don't move the way most bond funds move, so your so-called big picture has no real relevancy, as per usual, to your own personal big picture, more or less, give or take.

As much as I like David Giroux, I never liked PRWCX bonds; after all, PRWCX expertise is in stocks. Their bonds are mainstream, and probably what they care about. PRWCX AUM = about 66 billion. That's a lot of money in bonds. I love much smaller bond funds./blockquote>
I don’t know who Giroux leans on for bond picks. I do know he was way off base about 3 years ago in Barron’s when he asserted rather forcibly the Fed rate (or perhaps the 10-year) wouldn’t go much over 3% in the coming year. It did. I’ve tried unsuccessfully to pull up the edition of Barron’s. But do recall it was discussed on the board.
T Rowe’s fixed income was making a lot of progress until MaryMiller left in ‘09 to join the Obama administration. I don’t think it has ever recovered from that loss. RPSIX tells the story.