U.S. Fed's Rosengren says bank lending is robust

ABU DHABI Mon Nov 18, 2013 2:29am EST

The Federal Reserve Bank of Boston's President and CEO Eric S. Rosengren speaks during the ''Hyman P. Minsky Conference on the State of the U.S. and World Economies'', in New York, April 17, 2013.

Credit: Reuters/Keith Bedford

ABU DHABI (Reuters) - Capital ratios at U.S. banks have strengthened and bank lending is quite strong, a top U.S. central banker said on Monday.

"I think what we're seeing in the U.S. is that capital ratios have improved. We're now seeing pretty robust lending," Boston Federal Reserve President Eric Rosengren told reporters on the sidelines of a conference in the United Arab Emirates on financial regulation.

Asked where U.S. bank loans were going, he replied: "It's going both to the C&I, commercial and industrial, sector - it's also going to the consumer sector. That's exactly what you'd want to get with what we're doing with monetary policy, with the banks providing lending to both the households and the firms."

Rosengren declined to comment further on economic conditions or U.S. monetary policy. In an earlier speech at the conference, he said U.S. regulators should consider streamlining rules now being adopted that force big banks to hold more capital.

(Reporting by Martin Dokoupil and Regan Doherty; Editing by Andrew Torchia)

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