Federal Reserve Economic Data

On July 19, 2025, the Bureau of Labor Statistics released the second quarter data for total nonfarm employees at the state and metro levels. At the state level, 36 states experienced positive job growth and 14 experienced job losses. Texas led all states in job growth, adding 46,800 jobs in the second quarter. New Jersey had the largest decline, losing 10,700 jobs.

The FRED map above shows the change in employment in each state during the second quarter. If you sum up the individual states, you’ll see a net gain of 316,100 jobs (0.20% growth). This is different from the reported number for the nation, which was 449,000 (0.28% growth). This difference occurs because the state level has different sampling and tends to have a larger margin of error than the national number.

At the metro level, 216 areas experienced job growth and 155 experienced job losses or no change in employment. Employment increased by 197,000 jobs across all metro areas. The Los Angeles-Long Beach-Anaheim MSA led the nation with 18,900 jobs added in the second quarter. The Milwaukee-Waukesha-West Allis MSA had the largest decline, losing 7,800 jobs in the second quarter. These numbers tend to vary greatly from quarter to quarter, with even greater sampling errors than the errors at the state and national levels. So, be careful not to read too much into these data.

NOTE: These data are subject to future revision by the source, with an annual revision the following March. Our ALFRED database records vintages of the data, so users can view the data as they appeared at various points in history. The link takes you to employment for Missouri, as of July 19, 2025.

How these maps were created: Search FRED for “total nonfarm employees in Missouri” (or any other state). Click “View Map” and then “Edit Map.” Change the units to “Change, Thousands of Persons” and the frequency to quarterly with aggregation method “End of Period.” Under “Format,” select “User Defined Method” for how to group the data: Switch the number of color groups to 3 and change the colors to red for states that shed jobs (or a value less than or equal to 0), light green for states with modest job growth (or less than 10), and dark green for states with strong growth (or a value large enough to incorporate the rest of the states). For the second map, repeat the process with an MSA—St. Louis, for example.

Suggested by Jack Fuller and Charles Gascon.

At its September 2024 meeting, the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) cut its target range for the federal funds rate by 50 points, marking the beginning of a new easing cycle. In the months after, the 10-year Treasury yield rose from 3.65% on September 17, 2024, to a recent peak of 4.79% on January 13, 2025.

The FRED graph above shows 10-year Treasury yields for the past decade. An increase in long-term interest rates such as the 10-year Treasury yield is highly unusual at the beginning of a Fed easing cycle.

To investigate this dynamic, we can analyze the term premium: The term premium is the difference in the returns an investor expects to earn from (i) buying and holding long-term debt such as a 10-year Treasury bond and (ii) buying short-term debt and reinvesting it once it reaches maturity, such as buying 1-year bonds and rolling them over into new 1-year bonds every year for 10 years. In other words, it’s the amount of compensation investors demand for the risks inherent in investing in longer-term vs. shorter-term debt.

To compute the term premium, we need to estimate future short-term interest rates. In our second FRED graph, above, we present a term premium measure on a 10-year zero-coupon bond estimated by economists at the Federal Reserve Board. (Note that FRED also has term premia measures for bonds with maturities between 1 and 9 years.)

On January 13, 2025, the 10-year term premium reached its highest level since 2011, surpassing 0.8%. At that time, investors required a rate that was 0.8 percentage points higher to invest in long-term over short-term bonds for the same duration. As of May 2, the term premium stood at 0.5%, up from 0.05% before the September 2024 FOMC meeting. That is, the higher term premium accounts for more than half of the recent rise in 10-year Treasury yields, suggesting investors associate greater risk and uncertainty with investing in longer-term debt.

How these graphs were created: Search FRED for and select “Market Yield on U.S. Treasury Securities at 10-Year Constant Maturity, Quoted on an Investment Basis.” For the second graph, search for and select “Term Premium on a 10 Year Zero Coupon Bond.”

Suggested by Brooke Hathhorn and Mark Wright.

The FRED Blog Team remembers the introduction of computers and printers in the workplace: Printing became effortless. Now we rely almost entirely on digital files and hardly ever print paper copies anymore.

So, given that most documents remain in digital form, we’d expect to see a decline in the sale of paper. But is the anecdotal evidence reflected in the official statistics?

FRED doesn’t carry data specifically for retail sales of printing paper, but FRED does offer data for the broader category of office supply and stationery stores. Once we take price changes into account, using the CPI, we see a couple of things:

1. There was a rapid boom in office supplies and stationery in the last years of the 20th century.
2. Inflation-adjusted sales are now just one-fifth of what they were in the early 2000s.

So, yes: The data do seem consistent with the real-world evidence.

How this graph was created: Search FRED for “stationery.” Click on “Edit Graph,” add series “CPI,” and apply formula a/b*100.

Suggested by George Fortier and Christian Zimmermann.