June 2, 2021 12:00 p.m. – 2:30 p.m. ET | 11:00 a.m. – 1:30 p.m. CT Virtual video event presented by all 12 District Banks of the Federal Reserve System

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.

June 2, 2021 12:00 p.m. – 2:30 p.m. ET | 11:00 a.m. – 1:30 p.m. CT Virtual video event presented by all 12 District Banks of the Federal Reserve System

The Covid-19 pandemic and associated recession have had dramatically different effects across industries, with some, including large parts of the leisure and hospitality sector, truly devastated and others, like much of the manufacturing sector, able to recover quite quickly. This has led some analysts to describe the pandemic as a reallocation shock, requiring substantial movement of labor across industries.1 Such a process likely requires substantial time, during which the natural rate of unemployment may be elevated. In this Chicago Fed Letter, we consider two questions: First, has the need for labor reallocation risen, and second, has there been an increase in the amount of reallocation that is actually occurring?

On the first question, we find that one indicator of needed reallocation, the correlation across industries between unemployment and job vacancies, has fallen in a manner consistent with the need for greater reallocation. However, that result is due...

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 virtual event will focus on the important role summer jobs can play for Chicago’s South and West Side youth as vaccination rates rise and the pandemic shows signs of abating. Government, industry, community development, and research leaders will highlight the pandemic’s impact on youth, including the ramifications of school closures and strategies to support teens as the nation looks to recover. The panelists will discuss how summer jobs can benefit the economic prospects for youth—particularly those from Chicago’s Black and Latinx communities—and the ways in which employers, nonprofits, mentors, and volunteers can work together to grow opportunities for summer jobs and the valuable experiences they provide.

Experts will underscore:

The Covid-19 pandemic has resulted in great economic and financial disruption. To better understand how financial hardships have varied across communities, we investigate credit card delinquencies across the states of the Federal Reserve’s Seventh District: Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Michigan, and Wisconsin.1 While we find a slight increase of less than 1 percentage point in delinquency rates across the District overall following the onset of the pandemic, we find more pronounced increases of about 2 percentage points in low- and moderate-income (LMI) neighborhoods and about 3 percentage points in majority Black neighborhoods.

We focus on lower-income and majority Black neighborhoods because these neighborhoods have shown greater vulnerability to the employment and health effects of the pandemic.2 In the states of the Seventh District, 30.9% of census tracts had median incomes that were below 80% of the area median.3 These tracts are our LMI sample. In addition,...

The Covid-19 pandemic has resulted in great economic and financial disruption. To better understand how financial hardships have varied across communities, we investigate credit card delinquencies across the states of the Federal Reserve’s Seventh District: Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Michigan, and Wisconsin.1 While we find a slight increase of less than 1 percentage point in delinquency rates across the District overall following the onset of the pandemic, we find more pronounced increases of about 2 percentage points in low- and moderate-income (LMI) neighborhoods and about 3 percentage points in majority Black neighborhoods.

We focus on lower-income and majority Black neighborhoods because these neighborhoods have shown greater vulnerability to the employment and health effects of the pandemic.2 In the states of the Seventh District, 30.9% of census tracts had median incomes that were below 80% of the area median.3 These tracts are our LMI sample. In addition,...

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).

The American Rescue Plan Act (ARP) signed into law on March 11, 2021, authorized approximately $1.9 trillion in federal government spending. ARP is widely expected to boost economic growth over the next two to three years—and significantly so early on. The upswing in growth is likely to increase resource pressures and therefore consumer price inflation as well. The potential for this channel to raise inflation substantially has attracted the attention of economic commentators, including Olivier Blanchard and Lawrence Summers.1 But the magnitudes and persistence of the possible increases in inflation are often left unsaid. In this article, we take a closer look into the effects ARP may have on inflation.

We quantify the potential effects through the lens of four Phillips curve (PC)2 models that relate inflation to expected inflation, resource pressures, and past inflation in different ways. In the three models grounded in data since 1990, the effects are generally...

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.