The Economy pages show official statistics for the United States and Australia. Every figure names its source, the period it covers and when the source last updated it. A figure we have not collected yet is shown as unavailable, never as zero.
Sources
- United States: FRED, the database of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. FRED republishes series from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (CPI, jobs), the Bureau of Economic Analysis (PCE prices, GDP), the Federal Reserve (interest rates and Treasury yields), the Department of Labor (jobless claims), the St. Louis and Chicago Feds (financial stress indexes), Moody's, ICE and Cboe. We read FRED's public download files; the "updated at source" date comes from FRED's archive (ALFRED).
- Australia: the Reserve Bank of Australia's statistical tables (cash rate, bond yields, corporate bond yields, CPI, inflation expectations, GDP, labour force) and the Australian Bureau of Statistics Data API (the monthly CPI). The "updated at source" date is the RBA table's publication date.
- Fed funds futures: CBOT 30-Day Federal Funds futures prices from Yahoo Finance, which are delayed.
When figures update
We check FRED twice a day (mid-morning and evening, New York time), and the RBA and ABS twice a day (early afternoon and evening, Sydney time). A new figure appears after the source publishes it and our next check runs, so expect a delay of a few hours after an official release. Fed funds futures are collected every 30 minutes on US weekdays, and one snapshot per trading day is kept.
If a source is unavailable or sends a file that does not look right, we keep the figures we already have and try again at the next check. Each indicator page shows how many observations are stored and when the source last updated the series.
Figures we calculate
Some figures are calculated from the published series, and each one says so with its formula. For example:
- US inflation rates are calculated from the price index: (index this month ÷ index a year earlier − 1) × 100.
- Monthly job changes are this month's employment minus last month's.
- Spreads, such as the Australian yield curve (10-year minus 2-year yield) or the bank bill-OIS spread, subtract one published series from another on the same date.
- Australia's purchasing power is 10,000 ÷ the CPI index (September 2025 = 100).
When an input is missing for a period (for example, the US October 2025 CPI and household survey were not published after the federal government shutdown), the calculated figure for that period is missing too. We do not fill gaps.
Long charts of daily data are thinned to the last value of each week or month so they load quickly; the chart summary says when this applies. Indicator pages list recent values exactly as stored.
Revisions
Official statistics are often revised: jobs numbers in the next two monthly reports and in annual benchmarks, GDP in later estimates, and some indexes every week. Each time we check a source, we compare its values with the ones we hold for the same periods. When a value changes, we record the previous value, the revised value and when we noticed.
We can only see revisions made after we started tracking a series, which is the date of its first successful update here. Revisions made before then are already built into the history we downloaded and are not listed. For calculated figures, the revisions shown are to the source series (for example, the CPI index level rather than the inflation rate).
Market-implied rates are market pricing
The market-implied path for the US federal funds rate comes from futures prices: implied rate = 100 − futures price, because each contract settles on the average effective federal funds rate in its month. This is what traders are paying, not a forecast. It includes risk premia, thinly traded contracts can be stale (we leave out any contract with no trade for several days), and the prices are delayed. Earlier snapshots show how pricing has shifted since we started collecting them.
For Australia, the ASX publishes cash rate expectations from its 30 Day Interbank Cash Rate futures in the RBA Rate Tracker. ASX's website terms do not permit automated collection or republishing, and we have not found a free feed that does, so we link to the RBA Rate Tracker instead. The Australia page shows a simple proxy (the 2-year bond yield minus the cash rate target), labelled as a proxy.
General information
The dashboards are general information about the economy. They are not a forecast and not advice about any investment.