Shop Notes
Bank Tracker updates
Posted: Sept. 17, 2014 | Tags: BankTracker
BankTracker has been updated with second-quarter data on banks and credit unions around the country. Our ongoing study is based on reports from the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. and the National Credit Union Administration. You can search for information by the name of your bank or by state and city.
Our new data editor, David Donald, will be analyzing trends and writing stories occasionally based on this material, which we'll continue to update quarterly.
How we do this: Each quarter the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. requires every bank in the nation to submit detailed reports about its financial condition. This data is public and contains hundreds of data points for each bank. Workshop reporters download the data files from the FDIC website. Using experienced data journalists, we extract several key variables of bank performance. These include:
* Total Deposits
* Loans (net of allowance for loan losses)
* Net Income
* Provision for loan losses (the charge to earnings for realized loan losses)
* Tier 1 Capital
* Loan Loss Reserves (the allowance for loan losses)
* Loans that are 90 days or more past due (minus the amount of these loans guaranteed by the federal government)
* Loans that are in nonaccrual status (minus the amount of these loans guaranteed by the federal government). Nonaccrual means the bank can no longer claim interest income from the loan.
* Other real estate owned (minus the amount guaranteed by the federal government). These primarily are properties the bank has acquired through foreclosure.
We then calculate a “troubled asset ratio,” which compares the sum of troubled assets with the sum of Tier 1 Capital plus Loan Loss Reserves. Generally speaking, higher values in this ratio indicate that a bank is under more stress caused by loans that are not paying as scheduled.
