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.

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. 

Explore all the data in these release tables.

FRED has expanded both of its Eurostat releases, National Accounts – GDP (Eurostat) and Harmonized Indices of Consumer Prices (HICP) for the changes due to BREXIT. These series will show the GDP and Harmonized Index of Consumer Prices (inflation) values for the European Union before and after BREXIT.

These 34,000 series from Realtor.com Real Estate Data Library include data on listing price, square footage, active listings, median days on the market, and month-over-month and year-over-year changes for the United States and a selection of counties. Be on the lookout for MSA and state data in the near future.

FRED has added 184 new series from the U.S. Census Bureau’s Quarterly Services Survey (QSS). These series include all the new seasonally adjusted estimates of revenue introduced in March (covering fourth quarter 2019 data). The QSS is the only measure of performance for service industry indicators, providing timely estimates of revenue and expenses for selected industries.

The following NAICS industry groups are included:
* 52: Finance and Insurance
* 53: Real Estate and Rental and Leasing
* 62: Health Care and Social Assistance
* 71: Arts, Entertainment, and Recreation
* 561: Administrative and Support Services
* 5111: Newspaper, Periodical, Book, and Directory Publishers

The FRED team is working to ensure that the data and tools in FRED, ALFRED, and GeoFRED remain available during the outbreak of COVID-19 (Coronavirus). We are actively monitoring our sites to ensure ongoing functionality and resiliency, and we routinely prepare for contingency situations. Most data series in FRED are aggregated from other sources. FRED is able to continue pulling in data from those sources as soon as the sources update the data. Finally, you can continue to contact us if you have questions about FRED or any of the data found in FRED.

FRED has added a new series, Central Bank Assets for Euro Area (11-19 Countries), at a weekly frequency. This series will replace the monthly series with the same title.

This new series allows for more timely updates and more detailed data, since these data are released every week by the European Central Bank as part of the consolidated financial statements of the Eurosystem. And this series won’t lose the history of the existing monthly series in FRED.

The graph above shows both the new weekly and discontinued monthly series together. To convert this new weekly series to a monthly series, use the “Edit Graph” panel to modify the frequency of the weekly series to “Monthly” and select the “End of Period” aggregation method.