With household finance, the monthly difference between your net income and your expenses is the cash supply left over that you can save. The US Bureau of Economic Analysis summarizes all this information at the national level. Here at the FRED Blog, we’d like to help connect and clarify those national and household perspectives.

The FRED graph above shows the monthly changes, measured in billions of dollars, in net personal income (blue bars), expenses (green bars), and saving (orange bars) between January and December 2024. Notice the name of the first two data series:

• Net personal income is labeled disposable personal income, which is the sum of all streams of personal income (including employer contributions to pensions, insurance funds, and social security) received by households, minus the personal taxes they paid.
• Expenses is labeled personal outlays, which is the sum of all the payments households made to buy goods and services (including repaying loans), plus donations, fees, and fines paid to the government or to the rest of the world.

Back to the FRED graph: In January and October, the monthly change in disposable income was larger than the change in outlays and personal saving increased. During the rest of the year, the change in outlays was larger than the change in disposable income and total personal saving decreased.

How this graph was created: Browse FRED data by “Release” and navigate the alphabetical listing to “Personal Income and Outlays > Table 2.6. Personal Income and Its Disposition, Monthly.” Next, select the following three series by clicking on the box to the left of their names: “Equals: Disposable personal income,” “Less: Personal outlays,” and “Equals: Personal saving.” Next, click on the “Add to Graph” button at the bottom of the webpage. Next, click on the “Edit Graph” button above the FRED graph and “Edit Lines” by changing the units to “Change, Billions of Dollars.” Click on “Copy to all.” Last, select the “Format” tab to change the “Graph type” to “Bar.”

Suggested by Diego Mendez-Carbajo.

Central banks around the world manage the composition and size of their balance sheets to achieve specific monetary policy goals. Economic conditions in Japan, however, have made this common tactic increasingly challenging.

The FRED graph above uses data from the World Bank’s Global Financial Development Database to show the value of assets held by the Bank of Japan (solid line) and the Federal Reserve System of the United States (dotted line). Those values are plotted as a percent of GDP to easily compare their change in relation to the overall economic activity in each country.

It’s obvious there are large differences between Japan and the US: The Fed started growing the size of its balance sheet during the global financial crisis that emerged in 2007. Japan’s central bank started a decade earlier and substantially accelerated that trend after 2012. The latest data available at the time of this writing shows that, in 2021, the value of the Bank of Japan’s assets is equivalent to 89% of their overall economic activity.

Recent research from YiLi Chien and Ashley Stewart at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis offers insights into the economic implications: Given the different types of assets held by the Japanese government and its central bank, tightening monetary policy could result in losses to the value of their stock and foreign currency assets. Thus, the potential pull-and-push between monetary and fiscal policy is particularly pronounced in Japan.

For more about this and other research, visit the publications page of the St. Louis Fed’s website, which offers an array of economic analysis and expertise provided by our staff.

How this graph was created: Search FRED for and select “Central Bank Assets to GDP for Japan.” From the “Edit Graph” panel, use the “Add Line” tab to search for and select “Central Bank Assets to GDP for United States.”

Suggested by Diego Mendez-Carbajo.

There’s no direct way to measure the market power of employees or employers, but some indicators can provide clues. One such indicator is the ratio of quits to layoffs, shown in the FRED graph above.

When employees feel they have good bargaining chips, they’re more like to quit a job, generally for a better one. In this situation, employers are less likely to lay off their workers: (i) because their best workers may already be leaving and (ii) because new workers might bargain for better conditions. So, when employees have more market power, quits should be higher and layoffs should be lower, which means this ratio should be high.

In the opposite situation (during a recession, for example), fewer employees quit because there are fewer opportunities. They feel their bargaining power is lower, and the quits-to-layoffs ratio is lower.

The recent data in the graph reveal that employees enjoyed historic levels of market power during the pandemic, but that has recently eroded to more typical levels. This observation is consistent with the increasingly successful return-to-work mandates across the economy, whereby employers have managed to impose more and more of their conditions in the workplace.

How this graph was created: In FRED, search for and select the series for “quits.” In the “Edit Graph” panel, add the second series by searching for and selecting “layoffs.” Apply formula a/b.

Suggested by Christian Zimmermann.