Indicators and Data

The Median CPI is a measure of the underlying inflation trend and can be helpful for forecasting inflation. It ranks all the inflation movements in the commodities and services components of the CPI and chooses the one in the middle. This makes the Median CPI less sensitive to large, transient price changes than the CPI and more flexible than the core CPI, which always simply excludes food and energy prices.

The Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland’s inflation expectations model uses financial data and survey-based measures of inflation expectations to calculate the expected inflation rate over various periods in the next 30 years. For example, the estimate for the 10-year expected inflation rate means that inflation is expected to average that rate over the next 10 years.

The Cleveland Fed provides daily “nowcasts” of inflation in the price index for personal consumption expenditures (PCE) and the consumer price index (CPI). Our nowcasts of the current rate of inflation in a given month or quarter come out before the official CPI or PCE inflation data are released. These nowcasts give a sense of where inflation is today and where it is likely to be in the future.

The Cleveland Fed provides a systemic risk indicator to gauge the level of systemic risk in the US financial services industry. Specifically, the indicator is designed to capture market perceptions of the risk of widespread insolvency in the banking system. The systemic risk indicator is based upon two measures of insolvency risk, one for individual banking institutions and the other for the nation’s banking system as a whole. When the insolvency risk of the banking system as a whole rises and converges to the average insolvency risk of individual banking institutions—the narrowing of the spread—it reflects market perceptions of an imminent systematic disruption of the banking system.

While the indicator can be expected to provide useful information about systemic risk in the banking system, it is one of a number of indicators that attempt to extract market signals from market prices. Because it is based primarily on market data, it reflects market participants’ beliefs about risk. Those beliefs may or may not be accurate assessments of true risk.

The Cleveland Fed now provides a systemic risk indicator that gauges the level of systemic risk in the US financial services industry.

The Cleveland Financial Stress Index (CFSI) has been discontinued.

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The spread between long and short maturity Treasury Securities provides a gauge of financial market conditions and may signal future economic growth.

Simple monetary policy rules typically provide a relationship between the federal funds rate and a limited amount of information on real economic activity and inflation. There are many such simple policy rules, and there are many ways that the economy may evolve going forward. We present the federal funds rates coming from a range of simple monetary policy rules based on multiple economic forecasts.

View the assets on the Fed’s balance sheet in a number of ways. Explore the evolution of the size and composition of the balance sheet since the introduction of new policy tools following the beginning of the financial crisis in 2008.

Create customized charts of various inflation indicators over time.

Download datasets available from the Cleveland Fed.