TALKING BIZ NEWS EXCLUSIVE
The Investigative Reporting Workshop at American University, in conjunction with msnbc.com, has launched a system for business journalists called BankTracker that examines banks to determine which ones are financially secure and which ones are in danger.
The analysis is based on reports every bank is required to file each quarter with the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., the federal agency that protects deposits and is part of the bank regulatory system.
The American Bankers Association and others in the industry asked msnbc.com and the Investigative Reporting Workshop to refrain from publishing a list of banks and their “troubled asset ratios.”
“In many ways, this is an extension of work I began doing 25 years ago when I was a business writer at the Des Moines Register,” Cochran told Talking Biz News. “Banking data was my initial foray into computer-assisted reporting. Each year we published agate tables — and how many in your audience will remember those? — of every bank in the state.
“When the state was going through a major agricultural recession, leading to bank failures, I created this ‘troubled asset ratio’ as a way of judging bank health. Later, while I was the national business correspondent at Gannett News Service, we did projects about the S&Ls and banks. Again, we listed every bank and S&L in the country and included this ratio.
“So, it was natural to me when the banking crisis broke out last fall to begin planning a similar project, this time taking advantage of the interactive nature of the Web.”
The service discovered, among other findings, that:
The system can be found here.
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