Stress tests!

Because there’s really nothing more enjoyable on a Friday afternoon than reading a document (pdf) entitled “The Supervisory Capital Assessment Program: Design and Implementation.”

It’s a summary, from the Federal Reserve, of how the government conducted its “stress tests” of the nation’s 19 largest banks. The results of those stress tests are expected to go public on May 4.

One thing that immediately jumps out at me: Treasury had just 150 employees working on these stress tests. If that sounds like a lot, consider that they were spread across 19 banks — and these are huge banks, each with more than $100 billion in assets.

I’m not passing judgment on the quality of their work — too early to do that — but that number really struck me.