American car owners are replacing their vehicles less frequently. Learn how that could affect auto manufacturing employment.
FRED has added 7 new series from the Board of Governors: three regular seasonal factors, three weekday-basis seasonal factors, and the number of production days by month. These seasonal factors are intended for use with certain motor vehicle assembly data found in Table 3 of the G.17 Industrial Production and Capacity Utilization release. Note: These are not seasonally adjusted data per se, but factors that can be used to calculate the adjusted data, which the Board describes here.
FRED will cease publication of St. Louis monetary base and reserves data contained in three releases: St. Louis Weekly Reserves and Monetary Base, St. Louis Bi-Weekly Reserves and Monetary Base, and St. Louis Monthly Reserves and Monetary Base. We direct your attention to an excellent alternative source of monetary base and reserves data: the Aggregate Reserves of Depository Institutions and the Monetary Base published by the Board of Governors. We believe this release includes all the relevant information about economic activity found in the series we are discontinuing. Notes for individual data series contain more details to assist you with a transition to potential substitutes, such as the one noted above. FRED’s final updates to the series in question will occur on Dec. 19, 2019 (St. Louis Weekly Reserves and Monetary Base and St. Louis Bi-Weekly Reserves and Monetary Base) and Dec. 20, 2019 (St. Louis Monthly Reserves and Monetary Base).
FRED has added 8 new series on business expectations and uncertainty from the Survey of Business Uncertainty, created by the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta in partnership with Steven Davis of the University of Chicago Booth School of Business and Nicholas Bloom of Stanford University. The panel survey measures one-year-ahead expectations and uncertainties that firms have about their own employment, capital investment, and sales across the entire U.S. economy, including large and small firms from every industry sector except agriculture and government.
Curious about the textile industry in New England during the early to mid-1800s? FRED has added data on cotton production by yards for 25 different textile mills in New England between 1815 and 1860 and an aggregate series of the total production of these mills.
The data come from “The New England Textile Industry, 1825-60: Trends and Fluctuations” by Lance E. Davis and H. Louis Stettler III, a chapter in Output, Employment, and Productivity in the United States after 1800, edited by Dorothy S. Brady and published in 1966.
FRED has added over 37,000 series from the gross domestic product by county release from the Bureau of Economic Analysis. The current, real, and real growth values comprehensively measure the goods and services produced in a county, parish, or county equivalent. The release tables provide an easy way for users to compare the size and growth of county economies across the United States.
Energy, health care, and housing may be pushing down our low rate of inflation: Is it weaker demand or stronger supply that’s at work?
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.