In the fall of 2012, the Open Economics Working Group organised a series of online events in order to create a list of the banks which failed in Europe during the latest financial crisis. The lack of a complete list of banks which were nationalised or ceased to exist motivated a group of people to join forces in compiling a dataset with some of the key parameters. This list was later visualised with the Timeliner tool of the Open Knowledge Foundation.
More than five years after the beginning of the financial crisis the world is still witnessing bailouts and bank failures on a regular basis. Since then an unknown number of European banks have collapsed under the weight of plummeting housing markets, financial mismanagement and other reasons. But how many European banks did actually crash during the crisis?
Currently more than 135 bank failures has been added to the Failed Bank Tracker. If you want to contribute to the list, please contact us at economics[at]okfn.org
Below follows some information on the columns we use in the tracker:
- Start and end of the bank failure
- Name of bank
- News title (if the information was retrieved from a media source)
- Description of the bank failure
- Source
- Source URL
- Place
- Location
Questions on geographical and historical scope
Initially focus has been on post-2007 bank failures. However we are attempting to expand the period and already hold data on bank failures with more historical data. In terms of geographical coverage, the data set currently only holds European countries. However additional countries could easily be added to the list. So get in touch if you wish to add bank failures from your country.