Announcements

To help place FRED in the center of your data world, the FRED Team has launched a new map feature for data series with geographic characteristics. Simply click the green VIEW MAP button on the upper right side of the graph to see the big picture.

These interactive maps have zooming, mouse-over, and full screen functions. They provide a cross-sectional perspective, rather than just a time-series form, that lets you compare regions. Reach all the advanced mapping features from the EDIT MAP button.

The EDIT MAP button takes you to our existing GeoFRED site with established tools, such as downloading data, modifying map colors, and creating custom legends.

Explore FRED’s 9 types of maps…

As of this week, FRED will update the State Unemployment Insurance Weekly Claims data from the U.S. Department of Labor’s Employment and Training Administration on Fridays at 8:30 am Eastern Time, instead of Thursdays. Also, FRED will include one additional week of data; that is, each weekly update will include claims data for each state as of the prior week, similar to the national release.

To facilitate this change, the state-level weekly claims data have been moved to their own release. There will be no changes made to the U.S. Unemployment Insurance Weekly Claims release; the data will continue to update on Thursdays at 8:30 am Eastern Time, as soon as the news release is available from the U.S. Department of Labor’s Employment and Training Administration.

FRED has added 132 new series and updated the release tables for the Board of Governors’ Factors Affecting Reserve Balances (H.4.1). The updates include the following additions: the Primary Dealer Credit and Money Market Mutual Fund Liquidity facilities, the temporary repurchase agreement facility for foreign and international monetary authorities (FIMA Repo Facility), the Commercial Paper Funding Facility II LLC, the Paycheck Protection Program Liquidity Facility, the Corporate Credit Facility LLC, and the Money Market Mutual Fund Liquidity Facility. The Board provides more details here.

FRED has added 288 new quarterly series from World Uncertainty Index authors Hites Ahir, Nicholas Bloom, and Davide Furceri: the World Pandemic Uncertainty Index (an aggregate index of discussion about pandemics) and the indices for 143 countries. 

Note that the World Uncertainty Index series have moved from the Economic Policy Uncertainty release page to its own release page, together with the World Pandemic Uncertainty and Discussion of Pandemics Indices.

Data from the Reports of Condition and Income for All Insured U.S. Commercial Banks will be published in FRED with a delay, given the extended period banks have been granted to submit their March 31, 2020, call report.

The Board of Governors is no longer updating the Mortgage Debt Outstanding release. All series published in this release can be found in Z1 Financial Accounts. Any links to the former release on FRED will redirect to the Z1 release. We apologize for any inconvenience. To assist users, we recreated the Mortgage Debt Outstanding release as a table. For more information, see the Board’s page.

FRED has added two new series from Economic Policy Uncertainty that track equity market volatility due to infectious diseases. These series use stock market volatility, newspaper-based economic uncertainty, and subjective uncertainty in business expectation surveys to provide a real-time forward-looking uncertainty measure.

FRED has added 448 new series from the U.S. Census Bureau’s Weekly Business Formation Statistics (BFS). The BFS gives an early look at business formation activity within the U.S. at a detailed state level and regional level.

This limited weekly data release by the U.S. Census covers business applications, high-propensity business applications, business applications with planned wages, and business applications from corporations. The quarterly release is also available on FRED.

As a result of the COVID-19 pandemic’s extreme impact on initial unemployment claims, the Philadelphia Fed has indefinitely suspended the release of the state leading indexes. For more information, visit their release webpage.

The Weekly Economic Index (WEI) provides a signal of the state of the U.S. economy based on data available at a daily or weekly frequency. Economists Daniel Lewis, Karel Mertens, and James Stock from the New York Fed, Dallas Fed, and Harvard University, respectively, created this indicator to represent the common component of 10 daily and weekly series covering consumer behavior, the labor market, and production.

These series are Redbook same-store sales; Rasmussen Consumer Index; new claims for unemployment insurance; continued claims for unemployment insurance; adjusted income/employment tax withholdings (from Booth Financial Consulting); railroad traffic originated (from the Association of American Railroads); the American Staffing Association Staffing Index; steel production; wholesale sales of gasoline, diesel, and jet fuel; and weekly average U.S. electricity load (with remaining data supplied by Haver Analytics).

All series are represented as year-over-year percentage changes and are combined into a single index of weekly economic activity. This index is not an official forecast of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, its president, the Federal Reserve System, or the Federal Open Market Committee.