Do you have a great idea on how to provide economic information to the masses?  Submit a proposal to the St. Louis Fed’s Beyond the Numbers conference held October 6-8, 2016.  This event aims to provide librarians and info pros with the knowledge, competence, and enthusiasm to disseminate economic information expertise to their respective audiences.  You can submit a session, panel, workshop, or lightning talk.  For more details, check out the conference website.  The deadline for proposals is May 31.

The Cleveland Financial Stress Index (CFSI) is temporarily unavailable due to the discovery of errors that overestimated stress in the real estate and securitization markets. Additional details will be made available when posting of the index is resumed.

The FRED monthly database for macroeconomic research (FRED-MD) now includes the April 2016 vintage. This database, designed for the empirical analysis of “big data,” is described in detail in a St. Louis Fed working paper by Michael W. McCracken and Serena Ng.

FRED has added 183 annual series from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics on minimum wage workers. These data cover hourly paid workers age 16 and older with earnings at or below the prevailing federal minimum wage across various educational levels.

FRED has just added more data published by the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas. Real Trade-Weighted Value of the Dollar by U.S. State (50 monthly series): These indexes calculate the inflation-adjusted value of the U.S. dollar against the currencies of countries to which U.S. states export. The real exchange rates are aggregated across countries for each state using the annual average export share to the country. Market Value of U.S. Government Debt (3 series): For many uses, market value more accurately represents the debt burden faced by the U.S. government than the par value. The par value of government debt, reported by the U.S. Treasury, reflects interest rates at the time the debt was issued; the market value of government debt (Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas researchers) is adjusted to reflect market interest rates as of the observed period.

FRED has added 324 quarterly aggregates of gross domestic product (GDP) from the Eurostat database. These data cover real and nominal GDP for the euro area, European Union, and European countries. Data for the euro area countries are presented with two versions of the euro currency series: One constructs the pre-1999 values using the irrevocably fixed exchange rate. The other (Euro/ECU series) uses the synthetic exchange rate of the European Currency Unit (ECU) to national currency to adjust for market exchange rate movements.