Tuesday, May 5, 2020

Weekly Economic Index (WEI)

May 5, 2020

 

Daniel Lewis, New York Fed
Karel Mertens, Dallas Fed
James Stock, Harvard University

The WEI is an index of 10 weekly indicators of real economic activity, scaled to have the units of four-quarter percent change of real GDP.

  • The WEI is currently -11.84 percent, scaled to four-quarter GDP growth, for the week ending May 02 and -10.90 percent for April 25; for reference, the WEI stood at 1.58 for the week ending February 29.
  • Today’s decline in the WEI for the week of May 2 is driven by decreases in steel production and retail sales, as well as a small drop in consumer confidence. The upward revision of the WEI for the week of April 25 is a result of the decline in this morning’s staffing index release being less negative than previously available data.
  • As alternative scales, the current WEI implies a 39.61 percent decrease in IP (YoY) and a 1603k employee decrease in nonfarm payroll. 
  • Data dashboard and .release (.pdf)
  • Historical data including recent release (.xlsx)

1 comment:

  1. Do you weight each data point equally? Thanks for sharing.

    ReplyDelete