This paper briefly recounts several of the key financial developments of 1974, describes the contingency planning exercise developed by the Minneapolis Federal Reserve Bank to encourage planning by large member banks, and then discusses some of the comments received in a trial run. The Appendix contains a copy of the exercise together with an illustrative example.

The 1972 version of WP9 was published as part of the Ninth District Economic Series.

The 1972 version of WP9 was published as part of the Ninth District Economic Series.

This paper reexamines the conventional wisdom that commercial banking is an industry in severe decline. We find that a careful reading of the evidence does not justify this conclusion. It is true that on-balance sheet assets held by commercial banks have declined as a share of total intermediary assets. But this measure overstates any drop in banking, for three reasons. First, it ignores the rapid growth in commercial banks' off-balance sheet activities. Second, it fails to take account of the substantial growth in off-shore C&I lending by foreign banks. Third, it ignores the fact that over the last several decades financial intermediation has grown rapidly relative to the rest of the economy. We find that after adjusting the measure of bank assets to account for these considerations there is no clear evidence of secular decline. To corroborate these findings, we also construct an alternative measure of the importance of banking, using data from the National Income Accounts. Again, we find no clear evidence of a sustained declined. At most the industry may have suffered a slight loss of market share over the last decade. But as we discuss, this loss may reflect a transitory response to a series of adverse shocks and the phasing in of new regulatory requirements, rather than the beginning of a permanent decline.

This paper examines the seasonal pattern of accruals for loan-loss provisions and chargeoffs chosen by bank managers. Using the existing literature on intra-year discretionary accruals, knowledge of the incentive systems used to evaluate bank managers' performance, and various regulatory characteristics, we predict that accruals for provisions and chargeoffs will cluster in the fourth quarter of each year. We examine quarterly data for 105 large bank holding companies from the first quarter of 1980 through the fourth quarter of 1990. Our results indicate that: (1) provisions and chargeoffs are clustered in the fourth quarter, (2) this clustering is not related to the level of business activity of the banks, (3) the proximity of a bank's actual capital to its regulatory capital requirement does not affect this clustering, and (4) current provisions are affected both by current chargeoffs and by expectations about future chargeoffs. To examine whether the systematic characteristics of these loan-loss provision and chargeoff decisions are understood by users, we also estimate a quarterly equity valuation model in which quarterly provisions should be differentially weighted to reflect their seasonal characteristics. We find strong evidence to indicate that equity prices behave as if the market participants take these seasonal properties into account.