FRED has added 286 new indicators of uncertainty, expanding the World Uncertainty Index portion of the Economic Policy Uncertainty release with indexes for individual countries. These indexes—developed by Hites Ahir (International Monetary Fund), Nicholas Bloom (Stanford University), and Davide Furceri (International Monetary Fund)—determine uncertainty using the frequency of the word “uncertainty” (and its variants) in the quarterly Economist Intelligence Unit country reports. The release tables have been updated to group the regional and individual country indexes.

FRED has added 78 new indicators of policy uncertainty for the U.S. and the world, expanding the offerings from the Economic Policy Uncertainty release. The series added include a variety of news-based indexes of uncertainty around overall economic and trade policies, as well as indexes of market volatility, for particular countries, sectors of the economy, and regional aggregates. The release tables group the series by concept and similar methodology. To learn more about the individual methodologies behind each index, look for the relevant description in each of the series notes.

FRED has added both the current and real-time Sahm Rule recession indicators, created by Claudia Sahm as part of a policy proposal for the book “Recession Ready: Fiscal Policies to Stabilize the American Economy.”

The Sahm Rule identifies signals related to the start of a recession when the three-month moving average of the national unemployment rate (U3) rises by 0.50 percentage points or more relative to its low during the previous 12 months. The current series is calculated using the revised values for the unemployment rate (UNRATE series in FRED), while the real-time series is calculated using only the unemployment rate (and the recent history of unemployment rates) that were available in a given month.

On October 4, 2019, FRED will no longer include data from the FTSE Russell. All 36 series from the Russell Indexes will be deleted from the FRED database, Excel Add-in, mobile apps, APIs, and all other FRED services.

Custom links to these series or custom graphs that contain these series may be broken or may return unexpected results. We apologize for this inconvenience and hope you continue to find value in our free data services.

FRED has added over 400 series on the refugee population and international migrant stock from the World Bank’s World Development Indicators.

International migrant stock is the number of people born in a country other than the one they live in, including refugees. Refugees are people recognized as such

• under the 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees or its 1967 Protocol
• under the 1969 Organization of African Unity Convention Governing the Specific Aspects of Refugee Problems in Africa
• in accordance with the UNHCR statute, the granting of refugee-like humanitarian status, and the provision of temporary protection.

Asylum seekers—people who have applied for asylum or refugee status and who have not yet received a decision or who are registered as asylum seekers—are excluded.

These series include data for individual countries, country groups, and the world. Search FRED for “refugees” or “migrant stock” to explore the data!

FRED has added over 440 data series from the Board of Governors’ H.4.1 statistical release Factors Affecting Reserve Balances. The release tables provide a detailed view of the reserve balances of U.S. depository institutions, the condition statements of each Federal Reserve Bank, and several other tables on the assets, liabilities, and commitments of the Federal Reserve Banks.

FRED has added over 18,500 series from the Local Area Unemployment Statistics release of the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS): monthly and annual-average estimates of civilian labor force, employed people, unemployed people, and unemployment rates for all census regions and divisions, states, and counties as well as metropolitan areas. The data are based on the Current Population Survey (CPS), which is the household survey used to calculate the national unemployment rate.

FRED has added over 500 data series from the Board of Governors’ H.8 statistical release Assets and Liabilities of Commercial Banks in the United States. Use the release table to easily choose between frequencies (weekly to annual), size (small or large), and charter (domestic or foreign).