Federal Reserve Economic Data

FRED aggregates data from various sources. Those sources routinely revise and update the data they produce. After all, more-accurate data allow for better decisionmaking. These sources also update the names of their data series to accurately describe the activity they record. FRED incorporates these updates with an automated process.

One source, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, provides the consumer price index (CPI) dataset, which measures the average change over time in the prices paid by urban consumers. The FRED graph above displays one CPI data series that had its name changed as of February 14, 2023: from “Cable and satellite television service” to “Cable, satellite, and live streaming television service.”

This update to the series name reflects the addition of customizable internet-based live streaming of television services, which had been commonly provided via land cable and satellite wireless signals.

So what does this FRED graph show? The time period is January 1992 to December 2022, the units are percent change from a year ago, and the values are the year-over-year inflation rate of television service prices. These prices had some cyclical ups and downs but were trending downward until 2011, when that declining trend reversed. In fact, price growth for television services has markedly outpaced total price growth for its parent category, recreation services.

Stay tuned to the FRED Blog for more news of updates to additional data series names.

How this graph was created: Search FRED for “Cable, satellite, and live streaming television service.” Next, click the “Edit Graph” button, select the “Line 1” tab, and use the “Units” dropdown menu to select “Percent Change from Year Ago.” Last, select the “Format” tab to change the graph type to “Bar.”

Suggested by Diego Mendez-Carbajo.

In the US, we commonly measure inflation with the yearly change in the consumer price index (CPI), which stands at 6.3% for January 2023. As we’ve said before in the FRED Blog, a single number like this can hide a lot of variation across all the goods consumed by Americans. So let’s look at a recent, interesting twist in prices in this country.

The FRED graph above divides the CPI into two parts: prices related to shelter and all other prices. It starts at an index value of 100 in January 2022 and ends in January 2023 to show how prices evolved over the past year. Shelter-only CPI has a value of 107.9, meaning it has increased by 7.9% since January 2022. All-items-except-shelter CPI has a value of 105.7.

The price of shelter has been continuously increasing, while the price for everything else stopped increasing in June 2022 and has even decreased a bit since. Does this mean our latest inflation episode is over except for shelter? Possibly, especially because there are data-collection lags when calculating the cost of shelter. Still, is six months enough time to claim victory and is the CPI even the right measure? We leave these difficult questions for policymakers to answer.

How this graph was created: Search FRED for CPI shelter. Click on “Edit Graph,” open the “Add Line” tab, search again for CPI shelter, but this time select the CPI less shelter. Choose unit “100 for a given date,” type in 2022-01-01, and click on “Apply to all.” Finally, reduce the sample period to one year.

Suggested by Christian Zimmermann.

Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell stated in November 2022 that “job openings exceed available workers by about 4 million.” That number currently stands at 4.7 million after continued strengthening of the labor market.

This mismatch between available jobs and workers to fill them has generated ongoing discussion, and the FRED graph above measures that mismatch in labor supply and demand: The civilian labor force, the amount of people working or looking for a job, is shown in red; the current employment level plus the number of job openings is shown in blue.

If the civilian labor force is greater than employment plus job openings, the economy has immediate capacity to fill open positions. Currently, the employment level plus job openings is at 170.5 million while the total civilian labor force is at 165.8 million. This is the gap of 4.7 million referred to above: that is, there are 4.7 million more jobs available than there are people available to fill them.

The pandemic has been emphasized as a cause of this acute labor shortage, but the trends in labor demand and labor supply in the graph above indicate that demand was already outpacing supply before the pandemic by about 1 million workers.

How this graph was created: Search FRED for “Job Openings” and select the right series. Click “Edit Graph,” search for “Employment levels,” then apply the formula a+b. Next, use the “Add Line” tab to search for and select “Civilian Labor Force Level.”

Suggested by Jack Fuller and Charles Gascon.