The Fed Tells All

The San Francisco Fed

The San Francisco Fed’s 12th District serves the largest geographic area. It includes Alaska, Arizona, California, Hawaii, Idaho, Nevada, Oregon, Utah, and Washington—plus American Samoa, Guam, and the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands.

According to its website (frbsf.org):

The San Francisco Fed has unique responsibilities and areas of expertise within the Federal Reserve System. It is the headquarters for the Federal Reserve’s Cash Product Office, which oversees and supports the entire system’s cash distribution process. … [It] hosts two specialized research centers, one in Economic Research and one in Community Development. The Center for Pacific Basin Studies promotes cooperation among central banks in the Asia-Pacific region and enhances public understanding of major Pacific Basin monetary and economic policy issues. The Center for Community Development Investments serves as a national clearinghouse of Communi ty Reinvestment Act (CRA) in vestment opportunities across the country and promotes research and dialogue in the field.

As might be expected, the San Francisco Fed also keeps up with IT economic developments. It produces the Tech Pulse Index (frbsf.org/economic-research/indicators-data/tech-pulse), an index of activity in the U.S. tech sector. “The indicators used to compute the index are investment in IT goods, consumption of personal computers and software, employment in the IT sector, as well as industrial production of and shipments by the technology sector. The index extracts the common trend that drives these series.” This is definitely worth any information professional keeping an eye on!

The Kansas City Fed

Not surprisingly, the Kansas City Fed (kansascityfed.org) is the System’s leader in agricultural economic research. It covers the 10th Federal Reserve District of western Missouri, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, Wyoming, Colorado, and northern New Mexico. So if agricultural economic forecasts or current situation reports are needed, this is the site for you. One example is the Agriculture and the Economy site (kansascityfed.org/research/agriculture), which has the latest thinking on this sector of our economy.

The Kansas City Fed also is home to the Center for the Advancement of Data and Research in Economics (CADRE; kansascityfed.org/research/cadre). CADRE provides the high-performance computing for the Fed to research technology, data curation, and content curation. One dataset usually of great interest is the Current Population Survey (CPS). This is a monthly survey snapshot of the U.S. labor force, conducted by the Census Bureau for the Bureau of Labor Statistics. CADRE is launching an access interface “in early 2016.” That had not occurred as I wrote this article, but I advise readers to stay tuned by watching the CADRE website. Or you can sign up for information alerts at the site as well. Your data librarian should certainly know about this center.

The Minneapolis Fed

Unique to this 9th District Fed (minneapolisfed.org) region, which covers Minnesota, Montana, North and South Dakota, 26 counties in northwestern Wisconsin, and the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, is the recently launched Center for Indian Country Development (minneapolisfed.org/indiancountry/about). The four foci of this center, all economically related, are land, business and entrepreneurship, housing and homeownership, and education.

Susan Fingerman is mostly retired but is keeping her hand in as an online librarian with the American Public University System (APUS.edu). She also writes the For the Common Good column published five times a year in the Information Advisor’s Guide to Internet Research.