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Supervisory Priorities Index

An annual measure of what bank examiners focus on — by agency and risk domain, from 1863 to the present.

The index is constructed from the published record of the three federal banking agencies: annual reports, examination handbooks, guidance letters, and risk assessments, totaling more than 44 million words. Each document is scored against fifteen supervisory risk domains — credit, capital, liquidity, market and interest-rate risk, governance, operations and technology, compliance, and others — using a transparent dictionary method validated against independent expert annotation. Aggregated to the agency-year level, the result is a continuous record of examination emphasis spanning the full history of federal bank supervision. The index measures this institutional record; the agencies' quarter-to-quarter commentary is the province of the Attention Monitor.

Purpose

The index exists to give supervision a memory that can be measured. After each crisis, the same charge recurs — that supervisors were looking at the wrong things — and it is almost never checked against what supervisors were actually emphasizing at the time. The index makes that check possible across the full history of federal bank supervision. It separates the durable shifts that legislation imposes from the temporary surges that crises produce, and it lets any modern episode be placed against a century and a half of precedent. For researchers it is the empirical backbone of the study of supervisory priorities; for everyone else it is a way to hold historical claims about supervision to the evidentiary record.

The series

Access

Data: Parquet · codebook · citation · source documents

Current state

The quarterly brief reports where each agency's current emphasis sits relative to its own history, and the research page describes the construction and validation of the index in full.