- What securities do FDIC-insured banks hold?
- How does seasonal weather affect construction employment?
- The oldest US data series in FRED
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- What securities do FDIC-insured banks hold?
- How does seasonal weather affect construction employment?
- The oldest US data series in FRED
- Productivity growth, as seen in 1996
- The link between crude oil prices and airfares
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What securities do FDIC-insured banks hold?¶
Thequarterly banking profileof FDIC-insured institutions provides an overview of their aggregate financial condition, including data on bank earnings, loan and deposit activity, and asset quality. According to theses profiles, mortgage-backed securities make up more than half of the total assets held on their balance sheets.
Our FRED graph above shows the makeup of these institutions’ balance sheets between the first quarter of 1984 and the first quarter of 2026. The asset classes are as follows, in descending order of relative shares:
- Mortgage-backed securities (blue area): bonds backed by pools of home mortgages (60.7%)
- U.S. Treasury securities (orange area): debt issued by the US federal government (33.5%)
- State and municipal securities (green area): bonds issued by states and local governments to fund public projects (5.8%)
- Equity securities (purple area): shares of ownership in a corporation (0.0%) We can see that mortgage-backed securities consistently represent the lion’s share of assets. However, between 2008 and the time of this writing, the share of those securities has decreased while the share of US Treasury and state and municipal securities has increased.Researchers at the Kansas City Fedpoint to changes in the regulatory environment and evolving preferences for risk to explain this changing mix.
These assets can also be classified as either trading securities or investment securities. Trading securities are intended to generate short-term financial gains and typically make up a small share of a bank’s total assets. Investment securities, on the other hand, make up the larger share of a bank’s total assets and typically have longer holding periods. Their type is reported on the balance sheet as either “held to maturity” (HTM) or “available for sale” (AFS).
Our second FRED graph below shows the proportions of HTM (blue area) and AFS securities (green area) held in FDIC-insured banks between the first quarter of 1994 and the first quarter of 2025.
Since 1996, most of the investment securities are available for sale, meaning they are held for an indefinite period of time and could be sold before maturity. However, since 2010, the proportion of investment securities that banks intend to hold until expiration, or maturity, has increased. At the time of this writing, they amount to 39.8% of all investment assets.
The Kansas City Fed researchers mentioned above ascribe this changing pattern to a strategy to better protect the value of mandatory capital levels against financial risk.
How these graphs were created: First graph: BrowseFREDdata by source and navigate to “Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation.” Select the release “FDIC Quarterly Banking Profile” and the release table “Assets and Liabilities of FDIC-Insured Commercial Banks and Savings Institutions.” Scroll to the section labeled “Securities” and check the boxes next to the series labeled “U.S. Treasury Securities,” “Mortgage-Backed Securities,” “State and Municipal Securities,” and “Equity Securities.” Scroll to the bottom of the page and click “Add to Graph.” Click the “Edit Graph” button and select the “Format” tab to choose “Graph Type: Area” and “Stacking: Percent.”Second graph: Navigate to “Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation” source again to select the same release and release table. Again, scroll to the section labeled “Securities” and check the boxes next to the series labeled “Available for Sale (Fair Value)” and “Held to Maturity (Amortized Cost).” Click “Add to Graph.” Click “Edit Graph” and select “Format” to choose “Graph Type: Area” and “Stacking: Percent.”
Suggested byJoe Kledis,Collin Eldridge,Melanie LeTourneauandDiego Mendez-Carbajo.