The Taylor rule is an equation John Taylor introduced in a 1993 paper that prescribes a value for the federal funds rate—the short-term interest rate targeted by the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC)—based on the values of inflation and economic slack such as the output gap or unemployment gap. Since 1993, alternative versions of Taylor's original equation have been used and called "simple (monetary) policy rules" (see here and here), "modified Taylor rules," or just "Taylor rules." We use the last term in this web page.

This web page allows users to generate fed funds rate prescriptions for their own Taylor rules based on a generalization of Taylor’s original formula:

Take On Payments, a blog sponsored by the Retail Payments Risk Forum of the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, is intended to foster dialogue on emerging risks in retail payment systems and enhance collaborative efforts to improve risk detection and mitigation. We encourage your active participation in Take on Payments and look forward to collaborating with you.

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The Ask Us Anything event series from the Center for Workforce and Economic Opportunity facilitates a national discussion among policymakers, community partners, and practitioners and engages them in real-time conversation. These events provide insight on implementation of rapid response policies, programs, and federal financial support. Discussions allow participants to identify gaps in service or funding and highlight successes at the local level.

The growth rate of real gross domestic product (GDP) is a key indicator of economic activity, but the official estimate is released with a delay. Our GDPNow forecasting model provides a "nowcast" of the official estimate prior to its release by estimating GDP growth using a methodology similar to the one used by the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis.

GDPNow is not an official forecast of the Atlanta Fed. Rather, it is best viewed as a running estimate of real GDP growth based on available economic data for the current measured quarter. There are no subjective adjustments made to GDPNow—the estimate is based solely on the mathematical results of the model. In particular, it does not capture the impact of COVID-19 and social mobility beyond their impact on GDP source data and relevant economic reports that have already been released. It does not anticipate their impact on forthcoming economic reports beyond the standard internal...

The Labor Market Distributions Spider Chart is designed to allow monitoring of broad labor market developments by comparing current conditions to those in up to two earlier time periods that the user selects. Distributions of the labor market variables are constructed over a time period that the user also selects, with the inner and outer rings representing the minimum and maximum values of each of the variables.

The three dashed gray rings in the chart represent the 25th, 50th, and 75th percentiles of the distributions, respectively. Indicators of labor market status are broken up into five groups: Employer Behavior, Confidence/Perceptions, Utilization, Wages, and Flows.

Data in the chart are updated twice monthly: once for the monthly Bureau of Labor Statistics employment report, and again for the Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey (JOLTS) update.

Back in April, during the height of the current pandemic, we asked panelists in our national Survey of Business Uncertainty a couple of key questions: what impact they anticipated the pandemic to have on their sales revenue in 2020, and when they expected COVID-related uncertainty to have largely abated. We repeated this line of inquiry in August, and the results are quite interesting. For the most part, firms' views about the size of the coronavirus impact on 2020 sales revenue haven't changed since April. However, they do anticipate that disruption from the virus will remain a part of the economic landscape for quite a bit longer than they did four months ago. Amid these views, firms' year-ahead expectations for sales and employment growth remain highly uncertain.

Chart 1 shows firms' best guesses about the impact of coronavirus developments on 2020 sales revenue in August, and it compares these results to the last two times we asked this question (in April and...

Federal Reserve officials unveiled a new approach to guide their interest rate decisions last week after a very busy year responding to the coronavirus pandemic. On Thursday, Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta President Raphael Bostic said it would be a “real mistake” for federal policy makers to declare victory prematurely in supporting the economy from the current shock. Wall Street Journal reporter Nick Timiraos interviewed Mr. Bostic during a live online broadcast to explore how the Fed is navigating the tough decisions now confronting it. Here is a transcript of the event:

NICK TIMIRAOS: Hello. Welcome to another edition of Ask WSJ. I’m Nick Timiraos, The Wall Street Journal’s chief economics correspondent and today I’m joined by Raphael Bostic, president and CEO of the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta.

For the next 30 minutes or so we’re going to talk through the current economic outlook and the central bank’s response to the coronavirus pandemic. Please...

Take On Payments, a blog sponsored by the Retail Payments Risk Forum of the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, is intended to foster dialogue on emerging risks in retail payment systems and enhance collaborative efforts to improve risk detection and mitigation. We encourage your active participation in Take on Payments and look forward to collaborating with you.

The views expressed in Economy Matters are not necessarily those of the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta or the Federal Reserve System.

Editor's note: Throughout Economy Matters, "Southeast" refers to the six states that, in whole or in part, make up the Sixth Federal Reserve District: Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Tennessee.

The Labor Market Distributions Spider Chart is designed to allow monitoring of broad labor market developments by comparing current conditions to those in up to two earlier time periods that the user selects. Distributions of the labor market variables are constructed over a time period that the user also selects, with the inner and outer rings representing the minimum and maximum values of each of the variables.

The three dashed gray rings in the chart represent the 25th, 50th, and 75th percentiles of the distributions, respectively. Indicators of labor market status are broken up into five groups: Employer Behavior, Confidence/Perceptions, Utilization, Wages, and Flows.

Data in the chart are updated twice monthly: once for the monthly Bureau of Labor Statistics employment report, and again for the Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey (JOLTS) update.

You can add location information to your Tweets, such as your city or precise location, from the web and via third-party applications. You always have the option to delete your Tweet location history. Learn more

The growth rate of real gross domestic product (GDP) is a key indicator of economic activity, but the official estimate is released with a delay. Our GDPNow forecasting model provides a "nowcast" of the official estimate prior to its release by estimating GDP growth using a methodology similar to the one used by the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis.

GDPNow is not an official forecast of the Atlanta Fed. Rather, it is best viewed as a running estimate of real GDP growth based on available economic data for the current measured quarter. There are no subjective adjustments made to GDPNow—the estimate is based solely on the mathematical results of the model. In particular, it does not capture the impact of COVID-19 and social mobility beyond their impact on GDP source data and relevant economic reports that have already been released. It does not anticipate their impact on forthcoming economic reports beyond the standard internal...