Financial Stress Index (CISS)
Retrieves the Composite Indicator of Systemic Stress (CISS) the European Central Bank publishes daily for the euro area, its largest members, the United Kingdom, the United States and China, back to 1980 for some. The index combines stress in money, bond, equity and foreign exchange markets and among financial intermediaries into a number between 0 (calm) and 1 (crisis), weighting the segments more heavily when they are stressed at the same time; it peaked in 2008 and in the euro area debt crisis.
Hollo, D., Kremer, M., & Lo Duca, M. (2012). CISS - A Composite Indicator of Systemic Stress in the Financial System. ECB Working Paper No. 1426.
No API key is needed. Weekly and monthly periods take the index on the last day of each period.
See definition: https://data.ecb.europa.eu/data/datasets/CISS
Also known as: CISS, systemic stress, financial stress, financial conditions.
Financial Stress Index (CISS) in Python
Install the Finance Toolkit with:
pip install financetoolkit -U
Then call get_financial_stress_index as shown below.
from financetoolkit import FixedIncome
fixedincome = FixedIncome(start_date='2026-04-01', end_date='2026-09-30')
fixedincome.get_financial_stress_index(
countries=['Euro Area', 'United States', 'United Kingdom', 'China'], period='monthly'
)
Which returns:
| Euro Area | United States | United Kingdom | China | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2026-04 | 0.004 | 0.0134 | 0.0222 | 0.0199 |
| 2026-05 | 0.0058 | 0.0069 | 0.0309 | 0.0059 |
| 2026-06 | 0.0098 | 0.0095 | 0.0072 | 0.0308 |
| 2026-07 | 0.0129 | 0.0493 | 0.0075 | 0.0209 |
| 2026-08 | 0.0205 | 0.0194 | 0.0011 | 0.0072 |
| 2026-09 | 0.0132 | 0.0092 | 0.0122 | 0.0015 |
Parameters
The function accepts the following parameters:
- countries (list[str] | str | None, optional): The areas to include, e.g. ‘Euro Area’ or [‘United States’, ‘United Kingdom’]. Defaults to None, which returns all of them.
- period (str, optional): Whether to return the daily, weekly or monthly data. Defaults to “daily”.
- rounding (int | None, optional): The number of decimals to round the results to. Defaults to None.
- growth (bool, optional): Whether to return the growth data or the actual data. Defaults to False.
- lag (int, optional): The number of periods to lag the growth data by. Defaults to 1.
- standardize (bool, optional): Whether to standardize (Z-Score) the result. When combined with growth=True, standardizes the growth values instead of the raw values. Defaults to False.