Supervisory Alignment Index
How much of a bank's supervisor's attention falls on that bank's vulnerabilities — quarterly, for every insured bank.
Supervisory risk is not the same for two banks with the same balance sheet. A bank loaded with credit risk faces more supervisory pressure when its examiner is focused on credit than when the examiner is focused on something else. The index measures that alignment directly. For each bank and quarter, it weights the bank's standardized exposures across four prudential domains — credit, capital, liquidity, and market and interest-rate risk — by the share of attention its primary federal supervisor is currently devoting to each domain. A positive value means the supervisor's attention is concentrated where the bank is exposed; a negative value means the bank's risks lie where its supervisor is not looking.
| Unit | Bank × quarter |
|---|---|
| Coverage | 2007–2025, roughly 349,000 bank-quarters |
| Inputs | Bank financials (public regulatory filings) × the supervisor's attention shares from the Attention Monitor |
| Scale | Attention-weighted sum of standardized exposures; sample mean near zero |
The series
Reading it
The index varies in both dimensions that matter. Across banks, business models differ: in any quarter, lenders with concentrated loan books and thin capital sit at the top of the distribution, while liquid, well-capitalized banks sit at the bottom. Over time, the supervisors move: when an agency shifts attention toward liquidity, as all three did after 2023, the index rises for every funding-constrained bank it supervises and falls for banks whose risks lie elsewhere. Divergence across the agency means is itself informative — it shows the three supervisors pointing at different parts of the same banking system.
Access
Data: quarterly aggregates (Parquet) · bank-level series available on request.
Current state
The quarterly brief reports where supervisory attention is moving; this index translates those moves to the bank level.