The Federal Reserve’s weekly balance sheet, released on 6 August for the week ended 5 August, records a deferred asset of $22.988bn at the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago. That is the largest figure ever printed on that line for the seventh district, across every weekly statement since the line was created on 5 January 2011, and Chicago is the only one of the twelve Reserve Banks whose worst-ever reading is the current week.
The deferred asset is not a debt and not a loan. When a Reserve Bank’s expenses exceed its earnings it stops sending money to the Treasury and books the shortfall as forgone remittances, to be worked off out of future earnings before payments resume; the H.4.1 explains as much in its own footnote 8. The weekly figure is an unaudited estimate, and the audited books for 2025 came in $769m worse than the weekly line had shown for the System as a whole.
The rest of the System is going the other way. Since the Fed’s own peak on 28 January the total deferred asset has fallen $12.897bn to $233.030bn, its smallest since June 2025. Ten of the twelve Banks improved over that span; New York alone accounted for $9.656bn of the fall. Chicago went backwards by $1.173bn, and Richmond by $308m. Chicago’s share of the System total has risen from 8.87% to 9.86% in six months, and it has set a new high in 25 of the 31 weeks of 2026.
The audited statements point at why. In 2025 Chicago paid 8.19% of the System’s interest bill to depository institutions while earning 5.19% of its interest income, a three-point gap that was 0.57 points the year before. Three Banks — Atlanta, Dallas and St. Louis — are currently remitting to the Treasury again.