ECON 2020 Extra Credit

October 8 There is no news about inflation, but it's worthwhile to start showing you some numbers early in the semester. First, there are two things to differentiate: a price index and an inflation rate. There are lots of price indexes. An inflation rate is the rate of change of a particular price index. We can get information on a price index like the CPI by using the keywords "FRED CPI". We can get information on the inflation rate (according to the CPI) with the keywords "FRED CPI inflation". October 6 The discussion on the 3rd got cut off by a student announcement. We're going to navigate to the same page, but continue down the drop-down list a bit. We continued with the page entitled "Civilian Unemployment Rate" that we got from Google using the keywords below. This time we played around with graphs showing you what the characteristics of the unemployed actually are. So, you use the drop down menu to select "Reasons for Unemployment"...

September 22nd Skipped this today.   September 19th Skipped this today. September 17th The decision on interest rates was announced before class. What they are deciding on is a target for a rate; but it's not a rate that you or I have access to. Instead it is a rate used by banks between themselves. It's ... kind of ... the rate they all have in common. The thinking is that other rates that are less common will move in tandem with this one (and yes, they do tend to fairly strongly). They also don't set a rate anymore, rather they set a quarter point range in which it can fluctuate.  I showed a graph in class, but you should redo that search (since it was so close to the announcement that the data had not been updated yet). To see their upper limit on that range, you can use keywords like " FRED FOMC upper limit ". It is now 4.25%/year. The lower limit is 0.25%/year lower. The upper and lower limits were dropped by 0.25%/year. You will sometimes hear this referred ...