September 9, 2021 2:00 p.m. – 4:30 p.m. ET | 1:00 p.m. – 3:30 p.m. CT Virtual video event presented by all 12 District Banks of the Federal Reserve System

As featured in the Monday, June 21, 2021 edition of the Chicago Tribune

As our economy’s re?opening takes hold this summer, we can’t focus just on getting back to normal. Instead, we need to use the easing of the Covid?19 pandemic to seed economic opportunities that grow upward mobility across our city.

In my view, one of the first places to start is summer jobs for youth. Such employment can help limit the pandemic’s long?lasting consequences for 14 to 24 year?olds and their communities. And summer jobs programs have benefits that far exceed their costs.

Unfortunately, there is a summer jobs gap in Chicago. According to Sybil Madison, Chicago’s deputy mayor for education and human services, 10,000 to 15,000 more youth apply for jobs than are available each year through One Summer Chicago. This city program creates more than 20,000 summer employment opportunities and internships.

At the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, we’re working to close...

Where do you go when you want to make a difference? At the Chicago Fed, you’ll be a part of something larger – not just supporting an institution critical to our nation’s economy, but also joining a people-focused culture that understands the importance of community.

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 (release dates).

An important question for researchers and policymakers is how do companies’ individual actions affect the labor markets overall? The answer to this question can have wide-ranging implications, both for the spillover effects of a large employer’s voluntary labor policies and for optimal targeting of regulatory oversight. The experience of Ford Motor Company provides us with important insights into the impact of one large company’s labor policies—not only on its own workforce, but also on the local community and economy.

In a paper forthcoming in the Journal of Labor Economics, my co-author C. Lockwood Reynolds and I estimate the impact of Ford Motor Company’s wage policies using data from the first half of the twentieth century. We find that equal pay policies at Ford substantially reduced the gap in wages earned by Black workers compared with White workers not only at Ford, but throughout the Southeast Michigan region. By 1947, the regional wage gap was around half...

David Oppedahl, a Senior Business Economist at the Chicago Fed, explained in the AgLetter that, “At 14 percent, the year-over-year increase in the value of District farmland for the second quarter of 2021 was the largest recorded since 2013’s third quarter. All five District states exhibited double-digit year-over-year gains in their agricultural land values.”

The AgLetter stated that, “Of particular relevance to the District were the June corn, soybean, and hog prices, which were up 90 percent, 74 percent, and 100 percent from a year ago, respectively.”

Farmland values for the Seventh Federal Reserve District climbed 14 percent on a year-over-year basis in the second quarter of 2021—their largest such gain in eight years. Values for “good” agricultural land moved up 3 percent in the second quarter of 2021 from the first quarter, according to a survey of 152 District bankers. With 70 percent of the survey respondents forecasting higher District farmland values during the July through September period of 2021 and 30 percent forecasting stable values, such values were expected to rise again during the third quarter of this year.

Agricultural credit conditions for the District were better in the second quarter of 2021 than a year earlier, in spite of the pandemic’s impact on rural regions. Seventy-two percent of the responding bankers indicated that their respective lending areas had been at least modestly affected by the pandemic during the past year; yet, on average, just 34 percent of their agricultural borrowers were...

In the five years following its bankruptcy, despite ongoing demographic and fiscal challenges, Detroit was able to stabilize its relatively diverse municipal revenue structure. In 2020, the Covid-19 pandemic presented a new and significant set of challenges.

On March 23, 2020, Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer issued a statewide order “directing all Michigan businesses and operations to temporarily suspend in-person operations that are not necessary to sustain or protect life,” and prohibiting “all businesses and operations from requiring workers to leave their homes, unless those workers are necessary to sustain or protect life or to conduct minimum basic operations.”

These restrictions, other state and local efforts to protect health and safety, and individual decisions to curtail activities impacted Detroit’s revenue streams. The chart below shows the composition of major revenue sources of Detroit’s general fund for fiscal years 2019 and 2020. As we...

The Chicago Fed Advance Retail Trade Summary (CARTS) tracks the U.S. Census Bureau's Monthly Retail Trade Survey (MRTS) on a weekly basis, providing an early snapshot of national retail spending. Updates to CARTS are released at 10:00 a.m. ET on scheduled days. The first release of the month covers the entirety of the previous month (final release), and the second release covers the first half of the current month (preliminary release).

Where do you go when you want to make a difference? At the Chicago Fed, you’ll be a part of something larger – not just supporting an institution critical to our nation’s economy, but also joining a people-focused culture that understands the importance of community.