Money Smart Week is a national public education program coordinated by the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago that empowers people with the knowledge and skills to make better-informed personal financial decisions.

The Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago coordinates Money Smart Week as part of its outreach efforts to support effective policy-making and the economic development of all 7th District communities through promoting and contributing to economic and financial education.

History

Money Smart Week began in 2002 as a coordinated effort of more than 40 Chicago-area organizations working together to promote financial literacy. The Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago convened these members to share resources and ideas to achieve greater public awareness of the programs and services available in the city of Chicago.

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).

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 Brave-Butters-Kelley Indexes (BBKI) are a research project of the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago. The BBK Coincident and Leading Indexes and Monthly GDP Growth for the U.S. are constructed from a collapsed dynamic factor analysis of a panel of 500 monthly measures of real economic activity and quarterly real GDP growth. Monthly updates to the BBKI are released at 8:30 a.m. ET on scheduled days.

Throughout 2020, as the Covid-19 pandemic unfolded, small business closures across the United States dominated the headlines. In particular, many news stories highlighted the hardships faced by Black-owned and other minority-owned businesses. Moreover, the pandemic helped shed greater light on the fraught history that the U.S. has had with such small businesses.

In this blog post, we replicate for the city of Detroit an analysis published by the Brookings Institution on the state of Black-owned businesses for the U.S. as a whole.1 For that Brookings piece, its authors, Andre M. Perry and Carl Romer, conduct an exercise in which the U.S. business ownership landscape has perfect racial parity. By doing so, they attempt to represent what the economy would look like if there were a proportional number of Black-owned businesses to the Black population in the United States. Their exercise is based on the results of the U.S. Census Bureau’s 2018 Annual Business Survey...

Congress enacted the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) in 1977 in the wake of the civil rights movement. It was meant to address systemic discrimination in people’s access to credit and other financial services, particularly widespread redlining.

LaSalle Street hosts a discussion with executives representing exchanges, swap dealers, clearinghouses and asset managers on the impact of the Covid crisis and what to watch for as the pandemic eases.

Ketan 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 for this episode are Teo Floor, Chief Executive Officer of CCP12; Ulrich Karl, Head of Clearing Services at the International Swap Dealers Association; Pedro Gurrola Perez, Head of Research at the World Federation of Exchanges; and Jason Silverstein, Associate General Counsel at the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association.

The guests delve into a range of clearing and trading related topics including margining, pro-cyclicality, loss allocation, market structure, and the...

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).

In the top left panel below, we compare CARTS with the MRTS, showing that our weekly index closely tracks the monthly level data from MRTS. In the other three panels we show how retail spending (both the CARTS and MRTS) responded to the three waves of Covid-19 cases in 2020. This figure highlights the value of having a weekly retail spending index. Monthly indexes mask substantial week-to-week variation in retail spending. For example, in March 2020 our weekly index identifies a stockpiling effect, which is not noticeable in the averaged monthly spending data from the MRTS.

To answer the question in the title: Thus far, not dramatically so. In this Chicago Fed Letter, I document three facts supporting this conclusion.1 First, although the Covid period has seen multiple months with high rates of worker movement (reallocation) across industry sectors (relative to previous recessions), net cumulative reallocation from the onset of the pandemic through December 2020 is only the third highest among post-1945 recessions over the same horizon (and is only modestly outside the confidence bound for the average across those recessions). Thus, much of the reallocation during Covid seems to have been a reversion toward the pre-crisis allocation following the highly dispersed initial impact of the virus.

By now you've probably heard about the big mystery in the US economy: Restaurants can't find enough people to hire, even though millions of Americans remain out of work. Republicans blame the government for extending unemployment benefits and eroding the country's "work ethic." Democrats point to school and daycare closures that are forcing parents to stay home with their kids, as well as the continuing dangers the virus poses to people in frontline work.