Supervisory Capital Assessment Program

The Supervisory Capital Assessment Program (SCAP) is a forward-looking exercise designed to estimate losses, revenues, and reserve needs for eligible U.S. bank holding companies (BHCs) with assets exceeding $100 billion dollars. The assessments, commonly referred to as stress tests, conducted collaboratively by the Federal Reserve, Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, and Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (the agencies), assessed the BHCs under two macroeconomic scenarios: a baseline and a more adverse scenario. The baseline scenario reflects the February 2009 consensus expectation among professional forecasters of the depth and duration of the recession, while the more adverse scenario was designed to characterize a longer and more severe recession than that of the consensus expectation. From these two macroeconomic scenarios, the agencies developed a range of loss estimates and conducted an in-depth review of the banks' lending portfolios, investment portfolios, trading-related exposures, and revenue opportunities.

Related press releases

• Federal Reserve Board makes announcement regarding the Supervisory Capital Assessment Program (SCAP)--November 9, 2009
• Federal Reserve, OCC, and FDIC release results of the Supervisory Capital Assessment Program--May 7, 2009
• Joint statement by Federal Reserve, Treasury, FDIC, and OCC on Treasury Capital Assistance Program and Supervisory Capital Assessment Program--May 6, 2009 
• Board publishes white paper on process and methodologies employed by federal banking supervisory agencies in capital assessment of large U.S. banking holding companies--April 24, 2009
• Agencies to begin forward-looking economic assessments--February 25, 2009

Related documents

• The Supervisory Capital Assessment Program: Overview of Results (333 KB PDF)
• The Supervisory Capital Assessment Program: Design and Implementation (287 KB PDF)
• Frequently Asked Questions--Supervisory Capital Assessment Program (107 KB PDF)