Federal Reserve Economic Data

The Federal Reserve is subject to a dual mandate of price stability and maximum sustainable employment. In the course of achieving these goals, the Fed generates income and incurs costs:

• Income is earned from interest earned on securities acquired through its open market operations and from regulatory and supervisory fees.
• Costs are incurred from paying interest on reserve balances, interest on securities sold under agreements to repurchase (reverse repos), and operational costs such as payroll.

The Fed’s income typically exceeds the cost of its operations. By law, the Fed’s excess earnings must be turned over to the US Treasury as remittances. The FRED graph above shows the weekly excess earnings that are turned over to the US Treasury. From 2012 until 2021, the Federal Reserve remitted over $800 billion to the US Treasury. However, what happens when the Fed’s costs are greater than its income?

When the Fed’s costs exceed its income, the Fed creates a “deferred asset,” which is a negative liability whose value equals the cumulative shortfall in earnings. Once the Fed returns to earning a positive net income, it will pay down the value of the deferred asset until it reaches zero, at which point the Fed will resume sending remittances to the Treasury. This graph shows that the Fed’s costs started exceeding its income in September 2022, after the rapid increase in policy rates and the corresponding increase in the Fed’s interest costs.

Note that this data series from the Board of Governors provides a flow when positive, but a stock when negative. That is, when the Fed’s net income is positive, this series reports the weekly amount that is remitted to the US Treasury. When the Fed’s net income is negative, this series records the value of the deferred asset, which corresponds to the cumulative value of the negative net income incurred by the Fed. To compute weekly net income when this income is negative, one must then take the difference of the weekly series. This is why the series appears extremely negative over the past year: It reports the total value of the deferred asset, not the weekly flow.

In FRED, when a deferred asset exists, one can still compute the weekly flow of net income by editing the graph and switching the units to “Change, Millions of U.S. Dollars,” as below. Note that this will only represent the flow for weeks when the Fed’s deferred asset is positive and was also positive for the prior week. Note also that the amplitude of this change in deferred assets is similar to when the Fed is making remittances, as in the first graph.

How these graphs were created: Search FRED for and select “Liabilities and Capital: Liabilities: Earnings Remittances Due to the U.S. Treasury: Wednesday Level.” You have the second graph. End the sample period on 2022-08-31 and you have the first graph. For the third graph, start the sample on 2022-09-21, click on “Edit graph,” and change units to “Change, Millions of U.S. Dollars.”

Suggested by Miguel Faria-e-Castro and Samuel Jordan-Wood.

FRED provides not only data, but also a data release calendar. The calendar shows the dates and times of economic announcements from the US government and other sources. Simply click on “Release Calendar” on the FRED home page.

The default for the release calendar is the release data for the current week. But you can easily go back in time to find historical data in these releases: Use the radio button to choose weeks and months and the dropdown list to choose years. You can also select a specific type of release with that pulldown menu.

Example 1: If you select, say, the year 2022 and the month of March, and you leave the pulldown menu set to its default of “All Releases,” then you’ll see a calendar of all the releases for each day in March 2022. Click on the releases link on a particular day in the calendar, and links for the releases on that day will appear below the calendar.

Example 2: If you select March 2022 but select “Gross Domestic Product” (GDP) from the pulldown menu, you’ll see all the GDP releases for that month. Turns out, there was only one GDP release that month: at 7:30 AM, Central Time, March 30, 2022. Click the link on March 30, 2022, on the calendar to see information below the calendar. The link on the left goes to the historical GDP data series page, which provides both nominal and real GDP measures and breakdowns of GDP by personal and government categories. The status column on the right displays the term “Updated,” which indicates this FRED series has indeed been updated with this March 30, 2020, data release.

There are at least a few reasons why you might want to know about the dates of data releases.

Newly released data can move financial markets and generate news stories. If you look at the releases for a given day, you can then see which releases may have made an impact, including which releases the financial press judged to be important.

If you are testing historical forecasts, you want to see when a particular type of data was released to know exactly when it could have been used in those forecasts. If you’re testing, say, the use of GDP to predict some other variable, then you want to have the best estimate of GDP available on that specific forecast date. (For variables such as GDP, which are revised after their initial release, you likely want to look up the original vintage—i.e., the value of the initial release of GDP on a specific date—on ALFRED.)

And you might want to know when important data releases will occur so that you’re prepared for them and the possibility of short-term volatility that may occur in financial markets. Research indicates that the most important announcements for financial markets are monetary policy announcements and employment data releases.

This release calendar is just one way FRED provides economists and anyone who loves economics with data and information for economic decisionmaking.

Suggested by Christopher Neely.

The Federal Reserve’s mission includes promoting the health of the US economy and the stability of the US financial system. One way the Fed accomplishes this is through standing liquidity swap lines with several foreign central banks. Swap transactions are designed to support financial stability by improving liquidity conditions in dollar funding markets at home and abroad. How do these transactions work and how often are they used?

The FRED graph above shows the weekly dollar amount of central bank liquidity swap transactions between the Federal Reserve and authorized foreign central banks between mid-December 2002 and mid-October 2023. The data are reported in the H.4.1 release from the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System.

As described by the Board of Governors, a swap involved two transactions:
“When a foreign central bank draws on its swap line with the Federal Reserve, the foreign central bank sells a specified amount of its currency to the Federal Reserve in exchange for dollars at the prevailing market exchange rate. The Federal Reserve holds the foreign currency in an account at the foreign central bank. The dollars that the Federal Reserve provides are deposited in an account that the foreign central bank maintains at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. At the same time, the Federal Reserve and the foreign central bank enter into a binding agreement for a second transaction that obligates the foreign central bank to buy back its currency on a specified future date at the same exchange rate. The second transaction unwinds the first. At the conclusion of the second transaction, the foreign central bank pays interest, at a market-based rate, to the Federal Reserve. Dollar liquidity swaps have maturities ranging from overnight to three months.”

The noticeably large spikes in the data correspond to time periods when international dollar liquidity was strained due to heightened uncertainty: during the Great Recession of 2007-2009, during the European sovereign debt crisis of 2011, and during the COVID-19-induced recession of 2020.

The Federal Reserve operates these swap lines under the authority of section 14 of the Federal Reserve Act and in compliance with authorizations, policies, and procedures established by the Federal Open Market Committee.

How this graph was created: Search the alphabetical list of FRED releases for “H.4.1 Factors Affecting Reserve Balances” and select “Table 1. Factors Affecting Reserve Balances of Depository Institutions Wednesday Level.” Select the data series “Central bank liquidity swaps.”

Suggested by Diego Mendez-Carbajo.