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🚦Signals: Top Sources for Economic Data & Insights

These diverse data, analysis, and trends sources are crucial for maintaining an independent and forward looking perspective on economic realities impacting your family, teams, customers and communities.

📊 Data & Signals

  • FiscalData API Documentation has open-source tools for tracking federal finance data.
  • Bureau of Labor Statistics - job market data and indicators including a portal of Charts for Economic News Releases.
  • Consumer Price Index (CPI) also from BLS
  • Bureau of Economic Analysis (bea.gov) - latest economic indicators published by the US Dept of Commerce.
  • Economic Diversification Index - tracks the economic diversification of the world's top 112 countries.
  • CBOE Volatility Index or VIX Index - a market indicator of expected volatility of the S&P 500 Index (how much the market thinks the S&P 500 Index will fluctuate in the 30 days).
  • EPFR - macro insights on fund flows and allocations tailored to quants and economists.
  • The Conference Board provides in-depth forward-looking economic indicators and insights gleaned from its Center for Economic Development as well as its membership of leading companies and unions.
  • Yahoo's free sortable chart tracks real-time prices, volumes and more.
  • Trading Economics - an aggregator of economic indicators, market indexes, exchange rates, bonds, and commodities.
  • Purchasing Managers Index: for Manufacturing, for Services. Provides early indicators of whether the economy is contracting or expanding: >50=Expanding; <50=Contracting; Exactly 50=No change since previous month. Tracked by the Institute for Supply Management (ISM).
  • ISMWorld.org for headline/infographic versions of latest indicators.
  • Shipping & Freight Insights - North America & Global freight market insights for supply chain professionals. Good source for early signals of trade and shipping impacts that could affect pricing.

🧭 Analysis & Insights

  • Havre Analytics - Succinct notes on latest economic trends and developments.
  • IDEAS - the largest bibliographic database dedicated to Economics and available freely on the Internet. Based on RePEc, it indexes 4.4M papers and resources from over 2,000 participating archives.
  • Edelman Trust Barometer - Global survey conducted each year to understand what people trust/mistrust and why.
  • Baseline Scenario - a blog focused on explaining key issues in the global economy and developing concrete policy proposals. Edited by Simon Johnson, professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management and former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund, and James Kwak professor at the UConn School of Law, chair of the Southern Center for Human Rights.
  • Historic Crypto Market Cap movement. It's helpful to track the relative rankings of crypto assets as they move up and down the market cap rankings list. CoinMarketCap has an easy to use URL that let's you quickly see how specific assets have moved up to down in a given period of time. Use this URL structure: https://coinmarketcap.com/historical/20230311/ and change the date at the end of the URL in order to see the top 200 assets by market rank for that specific date. You can open 2 or more browser windows then check multiple specific dates (say the beginning of the last 6 quarters) and notice how specific assets have moved up or down during that time.