What is the U.S. Financial Stress Score?

The score answers one question: how close is the U.S. financial system to a point where policymakers are forced to act?

That's a different question than recession probability, VIX, inflation, or Treasury yields taken in isolation. It's closer to proximity × severity × probability of policy-forcing financial-system stress — a judgment call that requires synthesizing Treasury-market mechanics, funding-market plumbing, and how the Fed and Treasury are actually behaving, not just what a single indicator says.

How it's produced

Each evaluation runs through three AI stages, each a different model, so no single model's judgment silently becomes the answer:

• Research & scoring — a deep-research model does live web research across Treasury, funding-market, and Fed-policy sources and proposes a score.
• Independent critique — a second model reviews that evidence independently, without seeing the first model's number, and derives its own. A real disagreement between the two triggers a targeted follow-up search on the specific point in dispute.
• Narrative synthesis — a third model writes the plain-language summary, explicitly explaining any disagreement between the first two rather than quietly averaging it away.

Scale and regime

The score runs 0–100: 0–15 accommodative, 16–35 mild watchfulness, 36–55 real but contained tension, 56–75 persistent restrictive policy (active QT at multi-year-high yields with a genuinely undecided upcoming Fed decision already belongs here, even with no crisis signal — restrictive policy plus real two-sided uncertainty isn't calm), 76–90 policy-forcing danger zone, 91–100 market dysfunction or intervention underway. A second, related figure — how much Treasury/Fed policy has actually begun supplying liquidity — is tracked alongside it, since high stress with a rising policy response reads very differently than high stress with no response at all.

Trigger metrics

Alongside the headline score, each evaluation tracks three metrics explicitly against the last published one — not reasserted fresh every cycle: Controlled Break Risk (0–100, the odds current stress breaks into an uncontrolled crisis rather than staying policy-managed), Liquidity Response Probability (0–100, the odds the Fed/Treasury actually supplies new support soon — distinct from how much support is already underway), and Phase (1 = tightening/policy-threat, 2 = liquidity response beginning, 3 = full backstop underway). Each carries its own stated reason for holding or moving. BTC, ETH, and XRP each get a short trigger note plus a utility score reflecting how much that asset is actually functioning as settlement/bridge liquidity right now, not just price momentum.

Fully automated

This is an information product, not a trading system or an advisory service, and there is no human-approval step in the publishing path — a material evaluation publishes automatically the moment the three-stage process completes.

Where the data comes from

Live web research plus a FRED-sourced macro grounding context (Treasury yields, a broad-dollar proxy, high-yield credit spreads) supplied to the research stage on every cycle.