A measurement record · 1863–2024
The Supervisory Compass
What American Bank Examiners Prioritized, 1863–2024
For 160 years, the OCC, the Federal Reserve, and the FDIC wrote down what they thought banking risk was. We read all of it—44.3 million words across 319 annual reports. The result is the Supervisory Priority Index: a panel that lets you watch examination attention rise, decay, and migrate across ten risk domains and three agencies, year by year, from the National Banking Acts to the present.
Where to start
Open the Explorer
Pick an agency, a risk domain, and a year range. Watch the supervisory attention curve. The data runs in your browser.
explore →Read Chapter 1
Edward Green walks into a bank in Malden in December 1863 and shoots the cashier. Hugh McCulloch's examiners take notes. The cycle begins.
read →Read the paper
160 Years of Examination Priorities. The academic paper introducing the SPI, with interactive result dashboards.
read →Check a narrative
Type a year, an event, or an actor. See what supervisors at the OCC, Fed, and FDIC actually weighted at the time.
stress-test →Living data panels
Six auto-updating BRDA panels: enforcement intensity, licensing dynamics, topic attention, citation networks, coordination scores, and bank-level supervisory exposure. With auto-generated briefings.
explore →Download the panel
The full SPI panel as parquet, CSV, or Stata. Codebook, source-document index, replication code. CC BY.
download →Browse the corpus
All 319 source documents with links to the original PDFs on FRASER. 44.3 million words from three agencies.
browse →Teach with it
Slide decks, problem sets, sample syllabi, and standalone classroom cases.
teach →What this site is
Most histories of bank supervision are narrative. They name regulators, describe crises, and tell you what the participants believed they were doing. Those histories are necessary, but they cannot be checked against the supervisory record at scale, because nobody had read the supervisory record at scale. We did.
This site is the place where the record can be queried. When a narrative history emphasizes a particular episode—the founding of the FDIC, the S&L crisis, the 2008 collapse, Operation Choke Point—you can come here and see how much supervisory text the agencies of the day actually devoted to it. Sometimes the narrative weighting matches the data. Sometimes it does not. Both outcomes are informative.