United States
Tracking the Global Economy
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United States
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PDF version of charts and data references
NOTE: The charts plot four main economic indicators tracked by the NBER dating committee; each series is indexed to 100 at the start of the expansion. The green line indicates the current expansion. The solid blue line indicates the average of the previous ten expansions. The two dashed lines report the highest and lowest values recorded across these previous expansions. For industrial production, employment, and real retail sales, the average series includes the 10 expansions starting with the October 1949 business cycle trough. For real income, the average starts with the February 1961 trough. For additional information, see the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis Economic Synopses, 2009, No. 4.
The following FRED® data series are used to create the charts above:
- Industrial Production
- Real Income
- Due to July 31st, 2009 NIPA revision, historical data for some components of Real Income are unavailable prior to 1995. As a result, we combined the current data (1995 to the present) with the data available prior to the benchmark (prior to 1995) for Personal Income and Personal Current Transfer Receipts and then deflated by the current Personal Consumption Expenditure: Chain-type Price Index (2005=100).
- Employment
- Real Retail Sales

