Businesses with no employees other than the owner often turned to personal funds in response to financial challenges during the pandemic. These nonemployers were less likely than employer firms to seek pandemic-related emergency funding and less likely to be approved.

The Chicago Fed Survey of Business Conditions (CFSBC) is a survey of business contacts located in the Seventh Federal Reserve District. The Chicago Fed produces diffusion indexes based on the quantitative questions in the survey that are released at 10:00 a.m. ET on scheduled days, normally in the second week of each calendar month.

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).

This is the first of two posts on the City of Detroit’s revenue structure. These posts build on the discussion at our recent Project Hometown virtual event, Charting Detroit’s Fiscal Future. In this post, we discuss Detroit’s municipal finances, specifically the city’s general fund, and how its sources of funding have evolved over time, including during the post-bankruptcy period, 2014–19. In a follow-up post, we discuss how the Covid-19 pandemic has impacted—and will likely continue to impact—those revenue sources.

What was Detroit’s fiscal position before the pandemic began in 2020? The bankruptcy process that began in July 2013 had led to debt reduction and reduced payments and obligations to retired city workers, and by 2019, city officials were pointing to improvements in Detroit’s fiscal management. According to the city’s annual fiscal report, “In the five years since bankruptcy, the City has stabilized and strengthened its fiscal position. The City...

This virtual panel will bring together experts to discuss learning loss for students during the pandemic, as well as the potential impacts of disruption on future academic achievement and economic opportunity. As part of the Project Hometown series, this panel will enrich our understanding of the strategies implemented to mitigate or pre-empt the negative impacts on students and their future educational and economic opportunities.

The goals of the session are as follows:

Local governments spend over 12 billion dollars annually funding the operation of 17,000 public libraries in the United States, yet we know little about their effects. We use data describing the near-universe of public libraries to show that public library investment increases children’s attendance at library events by 18%, children’s checkouts of items by 21%, and library visits by 21%. Increases in library use translate into improved test scores in nearby school districts: a $1,000 or greater per-student capital investment in local public libraries increases reading test scores by 0.02 standard deviations and has no effects on math test scores.

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For its latest episode, LaSalle Street welcomes cyber risk executives representing financial firms to discuss cyber and technology risk management.

Ketan B. Patel, policy advisor and head of financial markets risk analysis in the Chicago Fed’s Financial Markets Group, hosts this episode. Alessandro Cocco, vice president of the Financial Markets Group at the Chicago Fed, provides an introduction.

Joining the podcast are David Currie, chief information security officer at Nubank, and Alonzo Ellis, chief information security officer at Vanguard.

The guests provide background information on cyber risk management and delve into a range of related topics, including recent cyber incidents, cyber risk best practices, and vendor risk-management techniques. They also explore the lessons learned from the Covid-19 pandemic.

View transcript | View cybersecurity glossary

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 Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago's landmark building at the corner of South LaSalle Street and West Jackson Boulevard in the city's financial district has a rich architectural history. The Bank building was completed in 1922. It was designed by the firm of Graham, Anderson, Probst and White, which was responsible for developing many of the city's architectural landmarks including the Wrigley Building, the Shedd Aquarium, the Merchandise Mart and the Continental Illinois Bank building, which is directly across the street. The building's front facade, with its Corinthian colonnades rising 65 feet, was designed to produce "the impression of dignity and strength, in harmony with the power and purpose of the institution," according to a newspaper of the day.

The Bank featured a large open staircase in the LaSalle Street lobby, which led to the second floor. There, visitors found a central lobby with teller windows designed for bankers seeking loans from the...

Many observers, including most Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) participants in the June 16, 2021, Summary of Economic Projections,1 anticipate that the recent run-up in inflation in the United States will prove to be temporary, and annual inflation will be near the Fed’s target of 2% in 2022 and 2023. An important consideration for policymakers, however, is whether the private sector will similarly read the rise in inflation as temporary. That is, are long-run inflation expectations likely to remain anchored, or might the sharp rise in inflation cause long-run expectations to increase substantially as well?

In this Chicago Fed Letter, we consider a way of gauging how well anchored long-run inflation expectations might be based on how sensitive these expectations are to incoming news about short-term trends in consumer prices. The sensitivity measure we study varies more over time than the level of long-run inflation expectations, which has remained...