All Bank Statistics, 1896-1955, Digitized

This data set is a digitized version of “All-Bank Statistics, United States, 1896-1955,” (ABS) which the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System published in 1959. That volume contained annual aggregate balance sheet aggregates for all depository institutions by state and class of institution for the years 1896 to 1955. The depository institutions include nationally chartered commercial banks, state chartered commercial banks, and private banks as well as mutual savings bank and building and loan societies. The data comes from the last business day of the year or the closest available data. This digital version of ABS contains all data in the original source and only data from the original source.
This data set is similar to ICPSR 2393, “U.S. Historical Data on Bank Market Structure, ICPSR 2393” by Mark Flood. ICPSR 2393 reports data from ABS but excludes subcategories of data useful for analyzing the liquidity of bank balance sheets, the operation of financial markets, the functioning of the financial network, and depository institutions’ contribution to monetary aggregates. ICPSR 2393, for example, reports total cash assets from ABS but does not report the subcomponents of that total: bankers balances, cash in banks’ own vaults, and items in the process of collection. Those data are needed to understand how much liquidity banks kept on hand, how much liquidity banks stored in or hoped to draw from reserve depositories, and how much of the apparent cash in the financial system was double-counted checks in the process of collection, commonly called float. Those data are also needed to understand the contribution of commercial banks to the aggregate money supply since cash in banks’ vaults counts within monetary aggregates while interbank deposits and float do not.
While this dataset provides comprehensive and complete data from ABS, ICPSR 2393 contains information from other sources that researchers may find valuable including data from the aggregate income statements of nationally chartered banks and regulatory variables. To facilitate the use of that information, the naming conventions in this data set are consistent with those in ICPSR 2393.