The Chicago Fed’s National Financial Conditions Index (NFCI) provides a comprehensive weekly update on U.S. financial conditions in money markets, debt and equity markets and the traditional and “shadow” banking systems. Because U.S. economic and financial conditions tend to be highly correlated, we also present an alternative index, the adjusted NFCI (ANFCI). This index isolates a component of financial conditions uncorrelated with economic conditions to provide an update on financial conditions relative to current economic conditions.

The NFCI and ANFCI are updated on a weekly basis at 8:30 a.m. ET on Wednesday, and cover the time period through the previous Friday. When a federal holiday falls on a Wednesday or earlier in the week, the NFCI and ANFCI will be updated on Thursday.

The Federal Reserve Banks are committed to maintaining the resiliency of our services, especially through trying times. While we take steps to layer and embed security within our FedLine® Solutions, organizations utilizing these connections also play a vital role in maintaining business continuity across the network. To help prevent and respond to service or local connectivity disruptions, keep these 10 best practices in mind as part of your business continuity planning:

The Beige Book, published eight times per year, gathers anecdotal information from each Federal Reserve Bank on current economic conditions in its District through reports from Bank and Branch directors and interviews with key business contacts, economists, market experts, and other sources.

Read the latest economic conditions in Reserve Bank Districts in the Beige Book: go.usa.gov/xwre5

David Oppedahl is a senior business economist in the economic research department at the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago. Oppedahl conducts research on the agricultural sector and rural development, as well as analyzes business conditions and the regional economy. He directs the Chicago Federal Reserve District's survey of agricultural banks on agricultural land values and credit conditions and publishes the results in AgLetter—the Chicago Fed's quarterly agricultural publication. In addition to his research, he regularly briefs the Chicago Fed's president on the agricultural economy and organizes the annual agriculture conference. Before starting his career at the Chicago Fed as an associate economist in 1998, Oppedahl was a consultant in the economic research department at the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas. While at the Dallas Fed, he provided research support in the area of econometrics. Oppedahl received a B.S. in mathematics from Wheaton College, Wheaton,...

In this blog post, we document that recent revisions to the Chicago Fed’s National Financial Conditions Index (NFCI) have been large and clustered in time—a pattern not seen since the 2007–09 global financial crisis. As financial conditions tightened early on during the Covid-19 outbreak here in the U.S., there were large positive revisions to the NFCI through much of March. We show that revisions of this magnitude and in this direction have often preceded substantial increases in stock market volatility. More recently, in late March and April, the large negative revisions to the NFCI suggest that financial conditions are improving faster than expected by the historical relationships underpinning the index.

In late April, the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago collaborated with the executive associations of the chambers of commerce in its five District states (Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Michigan, and Wisconsin) to conduct a survey on the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on chamber members’ businesses. This survey was based on the methodology of the broader Chicago Fed Survey of Business Conditions (CFSBC). The new survey asked questions about the impact of the outbreak so far and expectations for the coming months. The survey was voluntary, and we primarily heard from small businesses in industries heavily affected by Covid-19.

The main results are as follows:

Agricultural land values for the Seventh Federal Reserve District edged up 1 percent in the first quarter of 2020 from a year ago, despite challenges to the farm sector related to Covid-19. Overall, there was no change in “good” farmland values from the fourth quarter of 2019 to the first quarter of 2020, according to the survey responses of 113 District agricultural bankers. The survey responses covered farm sector activity in the entire first quarter of 2020, most of which occurred before the proclamation that Covid-19 represented a national emergency in the U.S. Annual cash rental rates for District farmland were down for the seventh consecutive year in 2020. The amount of farmland for sale in the three- to six-month period ending with March 2020 was roughly equal to that in the same period ending with March 2019. Yet, the number of farms sold and the amount of acreage sold were somewhat lower during the winter and early spring of 2020 compared with a year earlier, as...

Update, May 15, 2020: Following the release of the latest Current Population Survey estimates and related micro data, we are able to calculate the actual value of our U-Cov rate for April, which was 30.7% (not seasonally adjusted). This was over a 17 percentage point increase from March, significantly higher than the 10 percentage point increase in the official “U3” unemployment rate (to 14.4% in April). A 4.8 million increase in the number of people working part-time for economic reasons, a 4.3 million increase in those on unpaid leave, and a 4.5 million increase in those out of the labor force that want a job all contributed to this increase. These were in addition to the 15.1 million increase in the unemployed, which also contributed to the increase in the U-Cov rate.

The Seventh Federal Reserve District states of Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Michigan and Wisconsin continue to play a key role in the agricultural economy of the United States, as well as the world. Although agriculture's share of the total Seventh District economy is decreasing, it remains a very important part of the larger economy.

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Jason Faberman is a senior economist and research advisor in the economic research department of the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago. His research focuses on the labor market, with a particular focus on how the interaction between employers and workers affects urban areas and the overall macroeconomy.

Faberman’s research has been published various journals, including the Quarterly Journal of Economics, the American Economic Review, the Journal of Monetary Economics, American Economics Journal: Macroeconomics, the Journal of Economic Perspectives and the Journal of Regional Science.

Prior to joining the Chicago Fed in 2011, Faberman served as a senior economist with the Philadelphia Fed and as a research economist with the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Faberman received a B.S. in environmental science and a B.A. in economics from Lehigh University, and an M.S. and Ph.D. in economics from the University of Maryland, College Park.

The Chicago Fed’s National Financial Conditions Index (NFCI) provides a comprehensive weekly update on U.S. financial conditions in money markets, debt and equity markets and the traditional and “shadow” banking systems. Because U.S. economic and financial conditions tend to be highly correlated, we also present an alternative index, the adjusted NFCI (ANFCI). This index isolates a component of financial conditions uncorrelated with economic conditions to provide an update on financial conditions relative to current economic conditions.

The NFCI and ANFCI are updated on a weekly basis at 8:30 a.m. ET on Wednesday, and cover the time period through the previous Friday. When a federal holiday falls on a Wednesday or earlier in the week, the NFCI and ANFCI will be updated on Thursday.

This blog is the second in a series that discusses how the current pandemic affects the financial positions of publicly traded U.S. corporations, the potential implications of these financial developments, and the federal policy response. The first blog discussed the financial positions before the pandemic started. It documented that many nonfinancial publicly traded companies entered 2020 with historically elevated levels of leverage. This second blog explains how we use stock returns to project the potential earnings losses due to Covid-19; this will be used in our next blog to project the evolution of firms’ financial positions.