Stress-test any narrative history

Reader Assessment

Type a year, an event, or a named actor. The site returns the SPI panel's weighting of that period across the OCC, the Federal Reserve, and the FDIC. If you have just read a narrative history that emphasized this period, this is the place to check whether the supervisory record agrees.

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Why this exists. Narrative histories of US bank supervision are necessary — and limited. They cannot show, at scale, what supervisors at the time were actually writing about. The SPI panel can. When a narrative emphasizes a particular year or episode, this page lets you check the weighting against the supervisory record. Sometimes the narrative weighting matches the data. Sometimes it does not. Both outcomes are informative.
v1. Year input only. v2 will accept event names (“Continental Illinois”, “Operation Choke Point”) and named actors (“Hugh McCulloch”, “Rohit Chopra”) via a hand-curated lookup table, plus a contrast view that compares the weighting against entries from Conti-Brown & Vanatta (2025) and other recent histories.