Consumers and businesses borrowed less as overall economic growth flattened in the weeks since two mid-March bank failures sparked financial turmoil, the Federal Reserve said in a report Wednesday. Banks in several parts of the country tightened lending standards and raised concerns about liquidity and uncertain expectations for future growth after Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank collapsed, some of the Fed’s 12 regional reserve banks reported.

Emergency lending by the Federal Reserve jumped to about $300 billion in the past week after two bank failures triggered turmoil in financial markets and the central bank said it would make additional funding available to financial institutions. Most of the borrowing came from the Fed’s so-called discount window, an emergency lending facility, and from loans to “bridge banks,” the federal entities that took over Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank after their failures. Borrowing at the...

Justice Amy Coney Barrett noted that the first use of the Heroes Act during the pandemic with regard to student debt was not the Biden cancellation plan, but rather the Trump administration’s student loan repayment pause. She asked whether the Republican-led states believed that the payment pause was allowed under the law. Nebraska Solicitor General James Campbell responded that he had “no way to assess that” but also argued that when Education Secretary Betsy DeVos extended the payment pause...

A decade after the financial crisis , The Wall Street Journal has checked in on dozens of the bankers, government officials, chief executives, hedge-fund managers and others who left a mark on that period to find out what they are doing now. Today, we spotlight former Citigroup CEO Vikram Pandit and the former chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, Gary Gensler. In short order in the past few years, Gary Gensler went from cleaning up the fallout from the financial crisis to...

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