What if banks could tap into their vast network of consumer and business accounts to ferret out signals about where the economy is headed?

J.P. 摩根 追逐 is doing just that with the launch of a new institute that uses "big data"in analyzing hundreds of thousands of accounts for clues about income and spending patterns.

The institute's first report, 周三发布的, offers a deep dive into consumer finances and shows that income and spending remains volatile for the broad middle class, 不仅仅是穷人.

研究ers tracked the spending and income patterns of 100,000 randomly selected individuals from a sample of 2.5 million accounts at the bank over a 27-month period ended last December. Among its findings: While two in five individuals saw their income vary by at least 30% from one month to another, three out of five individuals saw their spending vary by at least 30%.

The potential dividends from building this data asset aren't lost on 戴安娜•法雷尔(Diana Farrell) the institute's chief executive. She learned first-hand about the need for real-time information about household financial behavior as a top economic adviser to President 巴拉克•奥巴马(Barack Obama) 2009年和2010年.

"I can't tell you how frightening it was to be in the middle of the debacle of the recession and not have a good understanding of what was happening in the household sector. We were just starving for real-time information."

戴安娜•法雷尔(Diana Farrell) President & CEO, 12bet官方 研究所

J.P. 摩根 plans to build out its dataset so that it can look back historically, she said. The analyses of account data, which are stripped of any identifying information for bank customers, could help give insight into what Americans did last fall with their gasoline savings, 例如.

Other findings from the institute's first run through its data lab:

• Monday is the top spending day of the week and Sunday is the lowest. Americans spend three times as much on a Monday as they do on Sunday.
• 不包括纳税日， the single biggest day for consumer spending last year fell on March 3, the Monday that followed the single highest earning day of the year, Feb. 28.
• The top 12 days for spending at restaurants and bars 在2月至2月之间. 5月14日和11日.

Ms. Farrell said it isn't yet clear how to explain some of those statistics, so stay tuned.