You may have seen that article in the Wall Street Journal this week about growth in sour loans among big banks, led by credit card debt. According to data from the FDIC, commercial and industrial loans more than 90 days overdue surged by 22.8 percent, while write-offs of credit card debt jumped by $543 million in the first quarter.

That’s what data at the FDIC tells you. So what can data from Calcbench tell you?

To be clear, we don’t track all the same information that banks report to the FDIC. Information about gross and net charge-offs, however — we do track that, since banks disclose that data in their SEC filings. So we built a simple model to let you view charge-off information over time.

See the image below. We created a model in Excel using formulas that pull charge-off data from our databases. All you need to do is enter a bank’s ticker symbol in the upper-left field, and Calcbench does the rest.



In this example from Capital One Financial ($COF), you can see that net charge-offs have been piling up for the last few years, although first-quarter 2019’s $1.6 billion in charge-offs were slightly less than Q1 2018’s amounts. A financial analyst could use this model for any number of banks (we did) from Citigroup, to Wells Fargo, to Bank of America.

We also want to call out that this model tracks cumulative changes in charge-offs — which can be tricky to calculate, because Q4 numbers typically aren’t reported separately; they’re bundled into year-end totals. Our model automatically tracks cumulative amounts for the first three quarters and then subtracts that from the year-end total, so you can see Q4 on a stand-alone basis. (This harkens back to what Jason Voss said in our financial analysis master class earlier this year, about tracking financial disclosures over time.)

So how can you get your hands on this model? Just ask us at us@calcbench.com. We’re happy to share.

We also have, or are developing, other models that work in Excel, pulling data directly from our archives into a spreadsheet for easy analysis. If you have ideas for what you’d like us to build, let us know.

And of course, you can always tinker with your own models using our Excel Add-In. We have a whole YouTube video about how to do that.



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