United States Federal Reserve chairman Jerome Powell has conceded that his regulator was blindsided by the sudden collapse of Silicon Valley Bank (SVB), despite it being under their watch.

“I realized right away that there was going to be a need for a review. I mean the question we were all asking ourselves over that first weekend was 'how did this happen?'”

“We’re doing the review of supervision and regulation,” Powell said. “My only interest is that we identify what went wrong here,” he added.