What (One-liner)

A desk-ready summary of the Chicago Fed NFCI: the latest reading, its 13-week change, its percentile in the sample, and a tight / loose / neutral band — a real, sourced financial-conditions value instead of a guessed one.

How to use

Drag financial_conditions_v1 into Canvas and run — it self-fetches the NFCI weekly series from FRED. No input parameters. Wire it upstream of an institution institution_composite so the credit / rates seats read a real NFCI value, or read it standalone for a regime check.

Core formula

current    = NFCI[-1]
chg_13w    = current − NFCI[-14]                          # only if len > 13
percentile = 100 × (#values strictly < current) / N       # 0 loosest … 100 tightest
tightness  = tight (>0.1) / loose (<−0.1) / neutral

Assumptions & applicability

Assumptions: Chicago Fed NFCI (weekly), standardized to mean 0 / sd 1; tightness band ±0.1; percentile over the fetched window.

Applicable: US cross-asset / credit / rates regime context.

Not applicable: non-US financial systems, forecasting the index, intraday stress.

Input / Output contract

No inputs (self-fetching). Output: {nfci, tightness, chg_13w, percentile, as_of, n_obs}. On FRED unavailability (<2 observations) it returns {status: error, _error_kind: fetch_failed} — it never fabricates a number.

Known limitations

1. Percentile is over the fetched window, not the full historical index.
2. Tightness band ±0.1 is a fixed heuristic.
3. Headline NFCI only — not the adjusted ANFCI or the sub-indices.
4. Needs ≥2 observations; otherwise an honest fetch_failed error.