Source: Liberty Street Economics — Federal Reserve Bank of New York — 2026-07-07
Summary
New York Fed researchers used LLMs to extract data from millions of digitized historical newspaper pages, building a database of over 3,000 US bank runs from 1863–1934 — the most comprehensive of its kind. A companion post analyzes what the data reveal about banking crises.
Key Takeaways
- A central bank using LLMs as a historical-research tool, not just for supervision or forecasting.
- Key finding from the resulting dataset: poor bank fundamentals, not panic alone, are necessary for runs to cause failures.
- Released as a two-part series covering methodology and findings separately.
- Demonstrates LLM-based document extraction at a scale (millions of newspaper pages) that would be impractical with manual archival research.