The Board of Governors has made several changes to the H.6 statistical release, “Money Stock Measures,” to reflect changes announced on December 17, 2020. 

As of February 23, 2021, the H.6 statistical release is published at a monthly frequency, on the fourth Tuesday of the month. In addition, the following changes have been made: 

• Savings deposits are now recognized as a type of transaction account, reflecting the Board’s action on April 24, 2020, to remove the regulatory distinction between transaction accounts and savings deposits. Therefore, the items “Savings deposits” and “Other checkable deposits” are now combined into “Other liquid deposits” in the M1 monetary aggregate. This action increases the M1 monetary aggregate significantly while leaving the M2 monetary aggregate unchanged.
• The press release now contains only monthly average data needed to construct the monetary aggregates, thereby eliminating the release of data on institutional money funds and memorandum items on U.S. government deposits and deposits due to foreign banks and foreign official institutions. Components of the monetary aggregates will continue to be reported at a total industry level without a breakdown by banks and thrifts.
• Weekly average, non-seasonally adjusted data will continue to be made available, while weekly average, seasonally adjusted data will no longer be provided.

The changes described above have been implemented in FRED for the H.6 statistical release.

In addition, due to the discontinuance of institutional money funds series, the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis is no longer able to calculate Money Zero Maturity (MZM) Money Stock, so these series and the Real MZM Stock (MZMREAL) have been discontinued in FRED as well. Users interested in calculating MZM can obtain institutional money funds data from the Investment Company Institute (ICI).

For more details, see the Board’s announcements and the Technical Q&As for H.6.

FRED has expanded job posting data from Indeed. The release now features trends in job postings for France and several new metro areas in the U.S.

Indeed has discontinued wage-tier posting data, and these data will no longer be updated on FRED. Indeed has also modified their release methodology significantly.

These data are copyrighted and require pre-approval: Contact Indeed to request permission to use the data.

The U.S. Census Bureau has updated their Business Formation Statistics (BFS) release, and FRED now includes new monthly data starting in July 2004 (including new data for U.S. Census regions and national data by two-digit NAICS codes).

Quarterly data have been discontinued and replaced with similar monthly data. These monthly series can be found within the notes of the quarterly series. FRED also allows aggregation of data through the “Edit Graph” panel’s “Modify frequency” menu.

The BFS release

• provides timely and high-frequency data on business applications and employer business formations
• measures business initiation activity (Business Application Series) as indicated by applications for an employer identification number (EIN) on the IRS Form SS-4
• provides information on actual and projected employer business formations that originate from these applications, based on the record of first payroll tax liability for an EIN
• contains measures of delay in business starts as indicated by the average duration between the application for an EIN and the transition to an employer business

For more information, see the U.S. Census’s FAQs.

FRED has added about 120 series on weekly historical balance sheet records for the Federal Reserve System, starting in 1914 and spanning through April 2018. These series were digitized by Cecilia Bao, Justin Chen, Nicholas Fries, Andrew Gibson, Emma Paine, and Kurt Schuler in their working paper “The Federal Reserve System’s Weekly Balance Sheet Since 1914,” issued jointly with the Center for Financial Stability.

The Fed’s balance sheet line items evolve over time: Some aggregates do not appear in all of the historical press releases or stop being included after a certain date. The authors continue to calculate these series based on their subcomponents.

Details on the authors’ calculations and links to the corresponding series in the H.4.1 Factors Affecting Federal Reserve Balances statistical release from the Board of Governors are available in the relevant series notes under the individual FRED graphs.

FRED has added about 18,500 new series from the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Consumer Expenditure Surveys (CE) program. The CE program provides data on expenditures, income, and demographic characteristics of consumers in the United States, which are primarily used to revise the relative importance of goods and services in the market basket of the consumer price index.

The CE surveys collect data that fall into one of the following major expenditure categories:

• alcoholic beverages
• apparel and services
• cash contributions
• education
• entertainment
• food
• healthcare
• housing
• miscellaneous
• personal care products and services
• personal insurance and pensions
• reading
• tobacco products and smoking supplies
• transportation

The expenditure data and demographic and income information are provided in a variety of formats, including tables with estimates by region, income, age, race, education, occupation, and various other characteristics of the household or reference person. CE also provides tables that cross-tabulate using two characteristics (e.g., age and income) to allow users to further analyze the spending behavior for a particular subset of the population.

Explore these tables in FRED. For more details and definitions, visit the source’s Frequently Asked Questions.

FRED has added 159 new series from the U.S. Department of Labor’s Employment and Training Administration’s weekly report on pandemic claims. 

These state-level data include initial claims for unemployment assistance for workers impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic (including those workers who are not ordinarily eligible for unemployment benefits), as well as continued claims for unemployment assistance and emergency unemployment compensation for these workers. 

More details about the data and the expanded eligibility requirements are available from the Department of Labor’s FAQs for unemployment insurance relief. 

The U.S. Census Bureau has released an experimental data product featuring modeled state-level retail sales. The Monthly State Retail Sales (MSRS) report is a blended data product that combines monthly retail trade survey data, administrative data, and third-party data. Users are encouraged to view the MSRS methodology for more information on how the Census constructs the data.

These 624 series represent year-over-year percent changes for total retail sales excluding nonstore retailers as well as 11 North American Industry Classification System (NAICS) retail subsectors. The available release table provides a view for geographic and industry comparison, and all state-level data are available in GeoFRED.

FRED has added 118 new series from Indeed, which calculates trends in job postings on Indeed for the U.S., Australia, Canada, Germany, Ireland, and the U.K. For the U.S., indices are calculated for states, for the largest metro areas by population, and by wage tier. Indeed reports how the trends in job postings this year differ from those of last year, focusing on the recent changes in labor market conditions due to COVID-19.

Copyrighted: Pre-approval required. Contact Indeed to request permission to use the data at their contact information provided here.