The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation provides annual data on the number of insured commercial banks and the number of commercial failures in the United States. The file P2_33.XLS contains these data for the period 1980-1996.

a. Explore the relationship between these two time series by first producing and interpreting a scatterplot. Is the revealed relationship consistent with your expectations?

b. Next, generate time series plots for each of these variables and comment on recent trends in their behavior.