The above charts show the extremely high concentration of assets within the U.S. banking industry. The first chart shows the number of banking institutions by asset class as of December 31, 2008. When you combine the last two categories you see that less than 10% of banks have assets of more than $1 billion. Just over 1% of banks fall into the last asset class (banks that have assets over $10 billion).
The second chart shows the percentage of total U.S. banking assets hold by banks within each asset class. For example, banks with more than $10 billion in assets as a class hold nearly 80% of total U.S. banking assets. By looking at both charts you can see that just over 1% of the banks in the U.S. hold almost 80% of total U.S. banking assets. This wasn’t always the case. In fact the concentration of assets within a few large banks has dramatically increased in recent years. The same is true with banking deposits. Tomorrow I will have a chart showing how the concentration of banking deposits has increased since the early 1990’s.
Data Source:
FDIC
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