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.
These 26,000 series from Realtor.com let users compare housing markets for a selection of counties and MSAs by listing price, supply and demand scores, and market hotness rank, among other indicators. The release tables provide a topical view by geography for your convenience.
In this newsletter, we use a graph to show medical expenses price indexes, map the percentage of the population without health insurance across states and over time, share some tips for playing FREDcast, and quiz you on health economics.
Focus on Health Expenditures
This assignment provides instructions on building the graph below and includes writing prompts for out-of-class assignments.
Using GeoFRED® to Compare Health Insurance Coverage
This assignment provides instructions on creating the maps below and suggests prompts for in-class discussion. See how you do on our sample discussion questions below.
Percentage of the Population Not Covered by Health Insurance
Click on the map above to view an interactive version
Question: Name four states where the percentage of the population not covered by health insurance was less than 10 percent in 1999.
Again, click on the map above to view an interactive version
Question: Compare this map with the map above. How are they different? Name two states where the percentage of the population not covered by health insurance decreased between 1999 and 2012. Next, name two states where that percentage increased between 1999 and 2012. Briefly describe the potential impact of the Affordable Care Act of 2010 on the change in health insurance coverage per state.
Learning About Health Economics to Forecast Changes in Employment
Changes in employment depend on many factors. In March, 2020, the total number of workers on payrolls fell. Read on for more details and a list of resources to become a better FREDcast forecaster.
BLS Headline:
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, “Total nonfarm payroll employment fell by 701,000 in March (2020).”
Quiz Yourself on Different Aspects of Health Economics
Q1. As of the fourth quarter (Q4) of 2019, which is the largest component of household consumption expenditures for services in the U.S.?
Q2. As of the fourth quarter (Q4) of 2019, which is the second largest component of household consumption expenditures for services in the U.S.?
Q1. As of February, 2020, which sector of the U.S. health care industry employs the largest number of people?
Q2. Examine how the sizes of the four areas in the graph change over time. Which two sectors of the U.S. health care industry grew the most between 1990 and 2020?
Q1. As of 2016, which is the largest category of annual per capita expenditures by type of medical product?
Q2. As of 2016, which is the second largest category of annual per capita expenditures by type of medical product?
Now that you’ve aced this quiz, give it to your students using this dashboard. To customize this dashboard, just click the “Save to My Account” button at the top of the dashboard.
FRED has added an additional 28,600 state and MSA-level series from the Realtor.com Real Estate Data Library’s housing inventory core metrics, including data on listing price, square footage, active listings, median days on the market, and month-over-month and year-over-year changes.
