Bank Failures

[vpenney]

The good people of the FDIC published data on U.S. bank failures from 2000-2017, so I scooped it up and took a look. I want to look at 1) how quickly after the recession banks stopped failing, 2) who bought all those failed banks in 2009-2010, and 3) who has been buying failed banks since then.

I'm also going to wrangle some of the policy changes for banks and how enforcement (or lack thereof) could have affected these failures, for context.

Summary I started with a simple bar chart to group bank failures by year. I'll need to geocode these failed banks, and addresses for the purchasing banks will take some hunting, but I think geographic context will be interesting in this project.

Details

Possible headline(s): Was financial regulation a passing fad?

Data set(s): FDIC failed bank data

Code repository: GitHub Link

Possible problems/fears/questions:

• Tracking down the purchasing bank addresses/ locations could be tricky, since the dataset is pretty vague. I'm also not sure if any of those banks have larger holding companies. Honestly, I don't know much about banks, except for what I've learned from The Big Short, and that really had more to do with subprime lending than anything else ...

• I'd also like to find data on the total banks in the U.S., or somehow add more context to see how the banking industry has changed since 2009.

Work so far

So far, I've set up my data in pandas and contemplated how I can best visualize where these failed banks are geographically, without using a map. It could be best to just geolocate the cities and drop pins on a map, or do a choropleth by zip code, to show where banks failed following the recession.

Checklist

This checklist must be completed before you submit your draft.

• [X] I have already spent time with my data set, opening it, exploring it, etc
• [ ] I have created a "DIARY.md" file to save links and list all of the terrible, no good problems I come across
• [X] My issue links to my data set(s)
• [X] My issue links to my code repository
• [X] My issue explains what I'd like to explore in the data set
• [X] My issue includes images - either inspiration or what I've done so far

[kevinlitman-navarro]

• I like the idea of looking at who benefitted from bank failure, looking forward to seeing what the data says. I would guess that if banks are being sold, there's probably some degree of consolidation going on, so maybe you could make a timeseries tracking how un-competitive the market is. Or maybe that's totally wrong, idk.

• Can you show us the size of the failed banks, maybe with a scatter? Would like to see that, and then some annotations on which banks received government bailouts.

[maxarvid]

Hmm, your visual is so clean looking right off the bat, nice. Also a most excellent topic that has fallen by the wayside since the recession. I like maps, but I'm not sure the geocoding is absolutely necessary (even if it would be an impressive piece of coding). The pull for me is quantity. Were these banks insured by the FDIC? And if so, what is the total amount that the FDIC has paid out to cover their failures? To what extent has the selling off of the failed banks recovered these costs?

These are just suggestions, can't wait to see what direction the project takes!

[vpenney]

Update

Project Content

These are the number of banks, by state, that failed during the Great Recession. I've highlighted (kinda, the colors need work) the states where banks failed during the Great Recession, but have not failed since.

These are the number of failed banks, by state, from 2013-2017. According to the FDIC, we haven't had any failed banks in the US yet this year.

This little monster shows the assets lost, in millions of dollars, by failed banks, as well as the number of banks that have failed, from 2001-present. I'm still figuring out how to style this fella, since I'm using subplots and it seems to be partially rejecting my matplotlib style.

I'm thinking I might go for a purple color palette for this project (why not, right?) but I'm sort of halfway through switching from blue to purple, so pretend you only see in greyscale, I guess?

Any changes in direction or topic?

No real changes in direction as of now. I did some research and it seems as though the number of failed banks doesn't actually mean a lot in terms of banking regulations, although I'm definitely going to do some more digging into what's up with Georgia.

What does actually reflect regulations is an analysis of regulatory filings, so I'm going to dig up some data on that and add it for context.

The FDIC has information on the purchasing organizations for failed banks on a really terrifically high-tech website, so I'll scrape the asset/ acquirer info and regex it, then maybe make a waffle chart to see which organizations/ companies/ states are acquring these failed banks.

Problems/Questions

• I need to spend a little more time reading the matplotlib documenation about plotting on a secondary y axis so that graph makes some semblance of sense. I'm also not sure if bars are the best way to visualize assets lost vs. the number of failed banks (third graph)? Perhaps step charts would be better. Line graphs are probably the clearest, but they're also misleading, since these are totals by year rather than rates of change.

Checklist

• [X] I have included my visuals
• [X] I have filled out the sections above
• [ ] I have been updating my DIARY.md with details about my process
• [X] I have uploaded/updated any Jupyter Notebooks or other datasets into my code repository

[vpenney]

Final

Project visuals/text

Details

Headline: Breaking News: Bank failures do not reflect the economy

Published website version: https://vpenney.github.io/failed-banks

Code repository: https://github.com/vpenney/data-studio/tree/master/code/03-failed-banks

Final data set(s): https://github.com/vpenney/data-studio/tree/master/code/03-failed-banks

What did you find to be the most difficult part of this project?

Scraping the government website that had the acquisition information for each individual bank, then joining the datasets and attempting to clean it up.

Are you satisfied with what you produced? Is there anything you would like to change or improve?

I'm mostly satisfied, other than the fact that matplotlib/ Illustrator defeated me and I can't seem to get my bars in my bar graph to go OVER the grids. It's also a bummer that bank failures are even more uninteresting than they sound, but hey, lesson learned.

Checklist

• [X] I have included my visuals
• [X] I have posted my project to my project website
• [ ] I have been updating my DIARY.md with details about my process
• [X] I have uploaded/updated any Jupyter Notebooks or other datasets into my code repository