These figures simply do not compare with those of 1992 but tend to attract a supervisor's eye. Even at community banks, which have not been affected so much by the recent spate of highly visible problem borrowers, problem assets have increased to nearly 1 percent of loans and 6 percent of their capital and reserves.
Reserve coverage of problem loans also declined, to about 1.6 times problem loans compared with about 2.0 times for 2000. The number of problem smaller institutions has increased, and the costs of several recent bank failures raise the specter of a return to significant insurance premiums.