Finding.our new series on financial distress in advanced countries captures many well-known modern crises, such as those in japan and sweden in the 1990s. At the same time, the new series finds no financial distress in some other commonly identified crisis episodes, such as that in spain in the late 1970s. Even in the cases where the new series identifies the same episodes as existing chronologies, the timing is often quite different. Moreover, the scaled nature of the new measure provides useful information about the variation in the severity and persistence of the crises.For example, we find that japan experienced more than a decade of distress, with periods of extreme crisis, while Sweden experienced only a very short, moderate crisis.