Serving the public with innovative research and analysis
Research Spotlight
Assessing the Accuracy of China’s Economic Rebound from COVID-19
While China’s economy plunged following the outbreak of COVID-19, official data report that it has rebounded sharply. The San Francisco Fed’s China Cyclical Activity Tracker—or China CAT—confirms this, indicating modestly higher activity than China’s official data for the second quarter of 2020.
Learn more about China’s economic growth through quarterly updates to the China CAT data page.
Recent Publications
FedViews
Economic Outlook
Reuven Glick, group vice president at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, stated his views on the current economy and the outlook as of October 8, 2020
Economic Letter
Small Business Lending during COVID-19
Small businesses and farms were hit hard by restrictions that limited their ability to pay operating costs during the COVID-19 crisis. Banks played an important supportive role, substantially expanding the loans available to these firms during the early months of the crisis. The growth in lending was associated with small business participation in the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) and bank use of the PPP Liquidity Facility. Analyzing data for the first half of 2020 suggests that these programs were successful in supporting lending growth during the crisis, particularly among small banks.
Working Paper
Accounting for Low Long-Term Interest Rates: Evidence from Canada
In recent decades, long-term interest rates around the world have fallen to historic lows. We examine this decline using a dynamic term structure model of Canadian nominal and real yields with adjustments for term, liquidity, and inflation risk premiums. Canada provides a useful case study that has been little examined despite its established indexed debt market, negligible distortions from monetary quantitative easing or the zero lower bound, and no sovereign credit risk. We find that since 2000, the steady-state real interest rate has fallen by more than 2 percentage points, long-term inflation expectations have edged down, and real bond and inflation risk premiums have fluctuated but shown little longer-run trend. Therefore, the drop in the equilibrium real rate appears largely to account for the lower new normal in interest rates.
Indicators and Data
China Cyclical Activity Tracker
The China Cyclical Activity Tracker, China CAT, is an alternative measure of China’s economic growth based on research in Fernald, Hsu, and Spiegel (2019).
Cyclical and Acyclical Core PCE Inflation
Cyclical and Acyclical Core PCE Inflation divides components of core personal consumption expenditures according to whether they move in tandem with economic cycles or are independent of the state of the overall economy.
Daily News Sentiment Index
The Daily News Sentiment Index is a high frequency measure of U.S. economic sentiment based on lexical analysis of economics-related news articles.
Inflation Sensitivity to COVID-19
Inflation Sensitivity to COVID-19 divides core personal consumption expenditures inflation into components that are sensitive and insensitive to the economic disruptions caused by the pandemic.
PCE Inflation Dispersion
PCE Inflation Dispersion statistics present a more detailed summary of the personal consumption expenditure price index (PCEPI), a measure of U.S. inflation. Included are measures of the distribution of price changes across categories and diffusion indices.
Tech Pulse
The Tech Pulse data updates have been discontinued.
Total Factor Productivity
Total Factor Productivity (TFP) presents a real-time, quarterly data series for the U.S. business sector, adjusted for variations in factor utilization—labor effort and capital’s workweek.
Treasury Yield Premiums
The Treasury yield premium model decomposes nominal bond yields of various maturities into three components: expectations of the average future short-term interest rate, a term premium, and a model residual.
Wage Rigidity Meter
The Wage Rigidity Meter offers a closer examination of the annual wage changes of U.S. workers that have not changed jobs over the year.
Weather-Adjusted Employment Change
This page provides estimates of weather-adjusted employment change in the United States for the past six months. The estimates are aggregated from county-level estimates of weather’s employment effects, which were derived from a county-level analysis of the short-run effects of unusual weather on employment growth.
