What this section is. Three official funding indicators in one place: the price of secured overnight funding, the size of the banking system’s reserve buffer, and the Treasury’s cash balance that drains it. These absolute levels are a
user-defined strategy overlay, not a universal empirical law: +3bp, $2.90T/$2.80T and $0.90T/$1.00T are the operator’s own trigger levels, chosen as roughly the 95th percentile of their own framework.
A. Funding price — SOFR − IORB. Formula:
(SOFR − IORB) × 100 in basis points, daily. The emphasized line is the median of the last five
non-calendar observations; month-end, quarter-end, major corporate tax dates and large Treasury settlement dates are flagged as calendar noise and excluded from the filter and from the rule. Why it matters: a positive spread means secured funding trades above the Fed’s administered floor, which points to collateral or balance-sheet pressure. Strategy overlay leg:
active when the filtered median ≥ +3.0bp and the last 3 eligible (non-calendar) observations are all ≥ +3.0bp, so one calendar spike cannot trigger it. The +2bp / +5bp lines remain as this dashboard’s stricter analytical reference bands.
B. Liquidity buffer — bank reserve balances. Reserve balances of depository institutions at Federal Reserve Banks, weekly average of daily figures for the week ended Wednesday (H.4.1 Table 1; identical to FRED WRESBAL). Changes are computed as
current − as-of(t−7d) and
current − as-of(t−28d) in $ billions against real observation dates; trend speed is the 4-week change ÷ 4. Strategy overlay leg:
active when level ≤ $2.90T AND 4-week change ≤ −$50B; elevated when level ≤ $2.85T or 4-week change ≤ −$100B. If only one of the two conditions holds, the card reads
approaching and the leg does not count. Reserves/GDP with its rolling percentile is kept separately above as normalized structural context.
C. Fiscal drain — Treasury General Account. The Treasury’s operating cash balance at the Fed, same weekly basis (H.4.1 Table 1; identical to FRED WTREGEN); the Daily Treasury Statement closing balance is an official fallback tail when the weekly path is stale. Strategy overlay leg:
active when level ≥ $0.90T AND 4-week change ≥ +$50B; elevated when level ≥ $1.00T or 4-week change ≥ +$100B.
How to read the three-leg resonance. 0/3 normal · 1/3 watch (the named leg only) · 2/3 yellow warning, funding pressure building · 3/3 structural-top risk signal. 3/3 is a
fragility confirmation under this overlay — it is not a standalone or deterministic market-top forecast, and it carries no timing claim.
Official sources. NY Fed SOFR reference rates ·
Federal Reserve PRATES (IORB) ·
Federal Reserve H.4.1 ·
FRED WRESBAL ·
FRED WTREGEN ·
Treasury Daily Treasury StatementCadence, observation dates and fetch times.SOFR − IORB: observation 2026-09-18 · fetched 2026-09-21 23:56 UTC · daily business day · current · source: official
Reserve balances: observation 2026-09-16 · fetched 2026-09-21 23:56 UTC · weekly (H.4.1, week ended Wednesday) · current · source: FRED WRESBAL (FRED cached official CSV) + Federal Reserve H.4.1 current release
Treasury General Account: observation 2026-09-16 · fetched 2026-09-21 23:56 UTC · weekly (H.4.1, week ended Wednesday) · current · source: FRED WTREGEN (FRED cached official CSV) + Federal Reserve H.4.1 current release
Limitations. Reserves and the TGA are weekly averages released with a lag, so they cannot confirm intraday funding stress. No missing official observation is fabricated, interpolated or forward-filled: a gap stays a gap, a stale leg is labelled stale and excluded from the resonance count, and each leg fails independently so one unavailable series never blanks the other two. The absolute dollar and basis-point levels are regime-dependent — they are the operator’s chosen strategy thresholds, not an estimated statistical law.