This note describes a system for monitoring, measuring and publicizing exposures to and
from the household sector. This system, called the LEADS system, is designed to provide market
participants, regulators, and households with additional information to understand the
reallocation of resources within, from, and to the household sector in response to macroeconomic
events. The LEADS system has three components, of which the first is the main focus of this
paper. The first step is the collection of data on LEADS – Liabilities, Earnings, Assets,
Demographics, and financial Sophistication – at the household level. I argue that these
categories are the key dimensions to measure, that measurement at the household-level is critical
for accurate measurement, and that much of this information is available in institutions already
subject to government oversight and reporting requirements. The second step in LEADS is the
measurement of the exposure of each asset, each liability, and each income stream to
macroeconomic risk factors. This step is the subject of much of the field and practice of finance,
and describing the vast and evolving set of techniques for this step is beyond this paper