Tracking the Global Economy: United States

PDF version of charts and data references. NOTE: The charts plot four main economic indicators tracked by the NBER dating committee; each series is indexed to 100 at the start of the expansion. The green line indicates the current expansion. The solid blue line indicates the average of the previous ten expansions. The two dashed lines report the highest and lowest values recorded across these previous expansions. For industrial production, employment, and real retail sales, the average series includes the 10 expansions starting with the October 1949 business cycle trough. For real income, the average starts with the February 1961 trough. For additional information, see the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis Economic Synopses, 2009, No. 4.

The following FRED® data series are used to create the charts above:

• Industrial Production
  • Industrial Production Index
• Real Income
  • Personal Income in current dollars
  • less Personal Current Transfer Receipts
  • deflated by the Personal Consumption Expenditure: Chain-type Price Index
• Due to July 31st, 2009 NIPA revision, historical data for some components of Real Income are unavailable prior to 1995. As a result, we combined the current data (1995 to the present) with the data available prior to the benchmark (prior to 1995) for Personal Income and Personal Current Transfer Receipts and then deflated by the current Personal Consumption Expenditure: Chain-type Price Index (2005=100).
• Employment
  • Total Nonfarm Payrolls: All Employees
• Real Retail Sales
  • Retail Sales [SIC-basis] and Retail and Food Services Sales [NAIC-basis]¹
  • deflated by the Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers: All Items
• ¹ These two series are spliced to create a single series starting in 1947.

Create your own expansion charts using FRED® Graph or .xls templates.