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Announcements

FRED Continues To Improve Its Accessibility

The FRED team continues to make its website more accessible to all users. Enhancements have been made to FRED’s homepage, header and footer, release pages, search pages, and release tables. These include:

  • Keyboard accessibility: Keyboard users can easily determine their location on FRED webpages and navigate to find content and operate interface elements without a mouse.
  • Screen reader accessibility: FRED webpages have been reformatted to maximize the effectiveness of screen reader software. Screen readers are a specialist text-to-speech software that can be used by people with little to no vision to access website content.
  • Color contrast: The colors of FRED’s content foreground and background meet color contrast requirements that allow users to visually consume text and images of text.
Posted in FRED Announcements

Teaching About Core Inflation | Bring FRED into the Classroom | November 2023

Focus on Measures of Core Inflation

This handout provides instructions on building the graph below and includes writing prompts for out-of-class assignments.

From the FRED Blog

The post “Gauging underlying inflation” briefly describes the concept of underlying inflation trends and reviews FRED’s substantial repository of measures of trend inflation. You can also check this short video of Mark Wright explaining various inflation measures.

Quiz Yourself on Measures of Core Inflation

The FRED graph shows three personal consumption expenditures (PCE) price index data series from the US Bureau of Economic Analysis: the all-items inflation rate (the green dotted line); one inflation rate excluding the energy and housing categories (the blue line); and one inflation rate excluding the food, energy, and housing categories (the red line).

Q1. Between April 2020 and May 2021, which inflation rate was highest?

Q2. Between June 2021 and February 2023, which inflation rate was highest?

Read this FRED Blog post to learn more about those data.

The FRED graph shows two consumer price index (CPI) inflation rates: the all-items inflation rate from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics (the black dashed line) and the underlying inflation gauge, full data set measure, from the New York Fed (the red line).

Q1. Between July 2020 and February 2021, which inflation rate was higher?

Q2. Between March 2021 and May 2023, which inflation rate was lower?

Read this FRED Blog post to learn more about those data.

The FRED graph shows two personal consumption expenditures (PCE) inflation rates: the PCE inflation rate from the US Bureau of Economic Analysis (the orange dotted line) and the trimmed mean PCE inflation rate the Dallas Fed (the green dashed line).

Q1. Between April 2020 and January 2021, which inflation rate was higher?

Q2. Between February 2021 and February 2023, which inflation rate was higher?

Read this FRED Blog post to learn more about those data.

You can share these graphs with your students using this dashboard. To customize this dashboard, just click the “Save to My Account” button at the top of the dashboard.

Posted in Research Announcements

FRED Adds New Personal Consumption Expenditures (PCE) Price Index Data

FRED has added 42 data series with new features of the personal consumption expenditures (PCE) price index.

On September 28, 2023, the US Bureau of Economic Analysis started reporting two new PCE price indexes: one excluding the energy and housing categories from the all-items PCE price index and a second one excluding the food, energy, and housing categories. The BEA report also includes several tables showing how different goods and services have contributed to overall inflation. More details are available here.

Posted in FRED Announcements

A U.S. Government Shutdown Could Delay Some FRED Data

If funding for U.S. federal government agencies is not renewed by October 1, 2023, some U.S. data series updates may be suspended. The FRED team will monitor the situation and update the series in the FRED database as soon as new data are made available.

The FRED team will continue to serve all available data and tools to its users. Data not impacted by the government shutdown will continue to be updated on its regular schedule.

U.S. government data products from the following sources could be affected:

Posted in FRED Announcements

FRED Adds Macroeconomic Uncertainty Index Data

FRED has added three data series for the Macroeconomic Uncertainty Index for United States.

The Macroeconomic Uncertainty Index is a monthly measure of how unpredictable overall economic conditions are 1 month, 3 months, and 1 year ahead. Economists Kyle Jurado, Sydney Ludvigson, and Serena Ng use a set of 132 individual macroeconomic time series to calculate forecasting factors and estimate period-specific measures of uncertainty. More details are available here: Macro and Financial Uncertainty Indexes.

Posted in FRED Announcements

FRED Adds Wage Growth Tracker Data

FRED has added 67 Wage Growth Tracker data series from the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta.

The Wage Growth Tracker is a monthly measure of the nominal wage growth of individuals. The Atlanta Fed uses the individual answers to the Current Population Survey (CPS) collected by the US Census to calculate the typical percent change in the hourly wage of individuals observed 12 months apart. Different versions of the tracker show selected work and demographic characteristics of the survey respondents (shown as either 3-month or 12-month moving averages). More details are available here: Wage Growth Tracker.

Posted in FRED Announcements

FRED Adds SCOOS Data

FRED has added 1,106 new series of Senior Credit Officer Opinion Survey on Dealer Financing Terms (SCOOS) data from the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System. Each series represents a count for an offered response to one of the 79 survey questions.

The SCOOS is a quarterly survey of 20 or more financial institutions, providing qualitative information about the availability and terms of credit in securities financing and over-the-counter (OTC) derivatives markets, which are important conduits for leverage in the financial system. The participating institutions account for most of the dealer financing of dollar-denominated securities to non-dealers and are the most active intermediaries in OTC derivatives markets.

For more information about the survey, see the SCOOS data page.

Posted in FRED Announcements