A New Index to Measure U.S. Financial Conditions

An index that can be used to gauge broad financial conditions and assess how these conditions are related to future economic growth. The index is broadly consistent with how the FRB/US model generally relates key financial variables to economic activity. The index aggregates changes in seven financial variables: the federal funds rate, the 10-year Treasury yield, the 30-year fixed mortgage rate, the triple-B corporate bond yield, the Dow Jones total stock market index, the Zillow house price index, and the nominal broad dollar index using weights implied by the FRB/US model and other models in use at the Federal Reserve Board. These models relate households' spending and businesses' investment decisions to changes in short- and long-term interest rates, house and equity prices, and the exchange value of the dollar, among other factors. These financial variables are weighted using impulse response coefficients (dynamic multipliers) that quantify the cumulative effects of unanticipated permanent changes in each financial variable on real gross domestic product (GDP) growth over the subsequent year. The resulting index is named Financial Conditions Impulse on Growth (FCI-G). One appealing feature of the FCI-G is that its movements can be used to measure whether financial conditions have tightened or loosened, to summarize how changes in financial conditions are associated with real GDP growth over the following year, or both.

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