The predictive power of the senior loan officer survey: Do lending officers know anything special?

The answer to this question is yes, but not that much about banks. Every quarter the Federal Reserve System surveys a panel of senior loan officers at major banks across the nation. The results of this survey have been found in previous studies to provide useful information in predicting gross domestic product. This paper extends that work, finding that sector-specific survey results are relevant for predicting real activity in those sectors but, strangely, that the informative power of the survey results only marginally extend to various measures of performance in the banking sector.