[open-economics] Design questions for the Failed Bank tracker

Sat Oct 27 12:42:32 UTC 2012

Hi all,

Following the Data Sprint the Faield Bank tracker is at 98 bank failures.
The list here:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AkitojFFyvjCdC1lcmRhRU9WWExSdmJ6OFpySExzb3c#gid=2

This post is devoted to a few of the questions which have risen following
the sprint. I would be interested to hear if any of you have an opinion on
any of these issues:

1) Should the tracker be limited to failures post 2007?
The advantage of expanding the year average would be to enable tracking of
local financial crisis prior to the global financial crisis (such as the
Bulgarian banking crisis 1998-1999 or the Swedish crisis of 1992).

Does anyone have an opinion on this?

2) Should bank bailouts be included to the failed bank list?
In a number of countries banks across the board were provided guarantees
from provincial states (Germany), favorable government loans (Denmark,
etc.) or emergency access to national banks (FED, ECB, etc.).
These measures could be recorded in the tracker as well. I am a bit
reluctant to advocate for this at this moment, due to the magnitude for
such a project. I am however eager to hear if other would be interested in
doing this. One way to start could be to go through all the approvals from
DG Competition to member states for state aid measures to banks.

3) Should government documents supplements supplement the list?
Another way to expand the documentation of each bank failure, would be to
add official documents to the tracker. These documents could be accessed by
requests for documents with the European Commission, as all bank failures
expectedly involve the approval from DG Competition. Would this be relevant
or useful to folks?

4) What should be the preferred sources?
>From the sprint we learned that Italian bank failures could be added based
on official documentation from Italy's state Gazette journal. This served
as a good example of an ideal source. However the data sprint also showed
such a source is not available in all cases. I therefore think we should
remain open for using news sources as alternatives, at least until we can
verify the information via government sources.

That's all for now. Enjoy your weekend and thanks again to everyone who
joined Wednesday.

Best,
Anders
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