Chicago Fed Index

The Chicago Fed National Activity Index was released this morning and showed that the index was –0.58 in January, up from –0.69 in December. All four broad categories of indicators made negative contributions to the index in January.

One surprise in the release was that the index showed that January’s three-month moving average indicates low inflationary pressure from economic activity over the coming year.

The full release is here.

More Bad News

The Chicago Fed National Activity Index was just released and it showed a −0.91 reading in December, down from −0.29 in November. All four broad categories of indicators made negative contributions to the index in December.

This is not a well known economic report, so here is more on it:

"the CFNAI is a weighted average of 85 existing monthly indicators of national economic activity. It is constructed to have an average value of zero and a standard deviation of one. Since economic activity tends toward trend growth rate over time, a positive index reading corresponds to growth above trend and a negative index reading corresponds to growth below trend."

"The 85 economic indicators that are included in the CFNAI are drawn from four broad categories of data: production and income; employment, unemployment, and hours; personal consumption and housing; and sales, orders, and inventories. Each of these data series measures some aspect of overall macroeconomic activity. The derived index provides a single, summary measure of a factor common to these national economic data."