NEW YORK U.S. lawmakers lambasted former banking executives from the collapsed Silicon Valley and Signature banks at the start of a Senate hearing on Tuesday examining the failures of the two lenders in March.

"Why did you ignore admonitions from regulators?" Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown said in an opening statement. "There is a simple answer, the same answer we find for most big bank failures -- because the executives were getting rich," Brown said.

(Reporting by Tatiana Bautzer and Saeed Azhar in New York)