FRED recently added data from the Senior Credit Officer Opinion Survey on Dealer Financing Terms (SCOOS). As the name of this series strongly suggests, there’s a survey involved: The Board of Governors currently sends this survey to the senior credit officers of at least 20 domestic financial institutions. The questions ask for their opinions on current availability and terms of credit in securities financing and over-the-counter derivatives. This qualitative information is used by monetary policymakers to gauge general conditions in those financial markets.
The FRED graph above shows the responses to the first question in the survey:
“Over the past three months, how has the amount of resources and attention your firm devotes to management of concentrated credit exposure to dealers and other financial intermediaries (such as large banking institutions) changed?”
The color represents the specific response and the length of the color segment is proportional to how many participants chose that response:
- Increased Considerably is blue
- Increased Somewhat is red
- Remained Basically Unchanged is green
- Decreased Somewhat is purple
- Decreased Considerably is teal
The latest data at the time of this writing are from the first quarter 2023 survey, which shows the survey respondents devoted an unchanged amount of resources and attention to managing credit risks from the group of financial intermediaries. Additional questions in the survey ask about the dealer financing terms for other types of financial intermediaries such as hedge funds and insurance companies, among others.
To learn more about the origins and design of the SCOOS survey, read this working paper from Matthew J. Eichner and Fabio M. Natalucci.
How this graph was created: First, note that the graph title is omitted above (to make more room for the stacked bars), but the graph with the title is here. Now, search the list of FRED releases for “Senior Credit Officer Opinion Survey on Dealer Financing Terms” and click on the first entry (which refers to “Table View”). Next, click on “Counterparty Types (Questions 1-40)” and on “Dealers and Other Financial Intermediaries (Question 1).” The text of the questions and possible answers will be displayed in a table. Select the five possible answers and click on “Add to Graph.” Next, click on the “Edit Graph” button and use the “Format” tab to change the graph type to “Bar” and the stacking to “Percent.”
Suggested by Diego Mendez-Carbajo.
