Interesting and Useful sites for Economics Research

While trying to recover a lost title for my 69 VW Bug project, I was asked by the lovely Tx Department of Transportation to present a release of lein for the vehicle from a bank that had long since gone away. Undaunted, I did a bit of digging to try to locate the heritage of that bank (since once a bank is born, it never really goes away). After many hours on the phone with various government (state and federal) institutions, I found some new places I never knew existed. I wanted to share these places with ATS since they can be useful when researching.

The Office of The Comptroller of the Currency
www.occ.treas.gov...
Ok, first off, I didn't even know this department existed. They handle *ANY* bank that has the words National or N.A. in their name.

The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) charters, regulates, and supervises all national banks. It also supervises the federal branches and agencies of foreign banks. Headquartered in Washington, D.C., the OCC has four district offices plus an office in London to supervise the international activities of national banks.

www.occ.treas.gov...

While talking to the friendly lady there (and she was! WOW!), I was directed to a nice utility on the FDIC web site.

FDIC Bank Find
www2.fdic.gov...

FDIC Bank Find allows you to locate a single FDIC-insured institution by entering various bits of criteria, including a partial name. This tool will allow you to trace the heritage of a bank all the way back to the original bank. In my case, the bank I was looking for was established in 1873 and through a series of 5 mergers and takeovers is now JP Morgan Chase. I can see every merger and take over and name change that happened along the way thanks to this tool.

I hope people find this useful! Cheers!

Hmm.. not to appear selfish in bumping my own thread, but surely *someone* would find these links useful?