 And Mary Scanlon is a research and instruction librarian for business and economics at Wake Forest University. She earned her MBA from the Weatherhead School of Management at Case Western Reserve University and her MLIS from Kent State University. Her publications include Reconceiving, Entrepreneurship for Libraries, Collaboration and the Anatomy of a Conference, and the Entrepreneurial Library and Essays on the Infusion of Private Business Dynamism into Professional Service. She is currently serving as the Chair of the Business Librarianship in North Carolina, a section of NCLA, and teaches live 230 business and accounting research sources and strategies. Thank you very much, Mary, for doing this for us. Hey, thanks, Linda. I'm delighted to be here, and thanks everybody for joining me today on your lunch hour. We're going to talk today about economic indicators. And what do I mean when I say economic indicators? So when I talk about economic indicators, we're going to run through a handful of them. There are many, but we can only cover kind of top-line indicators today. And so for each, I hope to explain to you what that indicator is and how it's calculated, what it means, who would use it, and how. And I'll show you some government sources for those economic indicators. When I think about economic indicators, I need to cluster them into groups, because otherwise I get overwhelmed with a long list. And in my mind, there are four areas. There's the national economy, the financial environment, the commercial or industrial environment, and the consumer or household environment. And so the commercial environment, I think of as the producing portion of our economy and by the consumer or household environment, I mean the consuming portion of our economy. Today, however, we're only going to talk about the national economy and the financial environment. So when I think about the national economy, these are the three or four key indicators that you'll hear most often in the press and that are referred to and I think represent some of the key features of our economy. And those are gross domestic product, inflation, employment and unemployment. Gross domestic product, usually referred to as GDP, is the value of all finished goods and services produced within a geographic area for a specified period of time. And rather than just the importance of a number, it's the percent change or the trend line that's really important. Data is reported at multiple levels, national, state or metropolitan statistical area and it's available for different intervals such as annual, quarterly or monthly. And for the United States, some of your best sources will be the Bureau of Economic Analysis or FRED, the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. And we'll talk a little bit more about that later. Every country, you know, manages its or monitors its GDP and the best international source I reckon recommend is the World Bank. Here's the home page for the Bureau of Economic Analysis and you'll see the very first line item there is national under U.S. economic accounts and the first bullet point there is gross domestic product. And if you click through that, you can download a data table that resembles this into Excel and I've kind of shortened it up so it will show here on the screen but you'll see each table has a number and a title. The unit of measure is billions of dollars. This data happens to be seasonally adjusted and it gives you, you know, the author of the Bureau of Economic Analysis and you'll see the top line is gross domestic product by quarter for 2011 and 2012. And then below it I left in a few other lines because you'll see their personal consumption expenditures and then below that are lines on expenditures on goods, durable and non-durable, followed by expenditures on services. And below that was much more data but I just wanted to hone in on this and I would like you to notice that in the fourth quarter of 2012 if you look at line two of the chart personal consumption expenditures, consumer expenditures represented 71% of total GDP. So that's why you hear policymakers and legislators talking about consumer spending because it plays an enormous role in the overall health of our economy. I want to just take a brief tangent here to talk about the Federal Reserve Bank which is our nation's central bank. It has 12 districts spread across the United States. The St. Louis Fed maintains a collection of databases that provide just an enormous amount of very valuable data about our economy and the databases have fun names like Fred or Alfred which is archival Fred, Cassidi, Liberate and several others. Fred and Alfred provide you with data about the economy. Cassidi provides data about our banking industry. So if you're looking for information about assets that banks control or deposits they control or banks that are in trouble, Cassidi is a terrific source. And besides data the Fed also publishes working papers, a database of failed banks since 2007. It's got all sorts of data about sources and uses of tarp funds and much more. Now for those of you who may be unfamiliar with the idea of working papers these are scholarly papers but they haven't gone through that peer review vetting process. But at least in the area of economics working papers are considered, every bit is valuable maybe more so than scholarly journal articles because by skipping that vetting that peer review process the articles get published much more quickly. So they're more timely and they're more current. And I know that we're all focused in academic libraries on scholarly journal articles but these are still very valuable, very well written. So if you've got patrons working on current economic issues working papers will be one of your best sources and the Fed provides all of those free of charge. As is all the data from all of the feds but the St. Louis Fed in particular is terrific. The charts are interactive, you can either save the chart or you can download the data into Excel. And I encourage you to explore the databases at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. Here's a chart from Fred showing you gross domestic product for the United States from about 1947 through this year. And as you look at this I want you to note the vertical gray bars. These represent periods of recession. The recession is defined as two or more or three or more consecutive quarters of declining GDP and you see that reflected in the chart in each of the gray bars. As I said the chart is interactive and we could go in and we could just look at it for the last year the last three years whatever period of time is relevant for your patron and see more detail as you zoom in on shorter periods of time. Here's an example of GDP by state. In this case it's reported as a percent change by state. It's color coded, it's broken into some geographic areas and who knew that North Carolina was in the fourth quart or quintile for GDP growth. That's great news for North Carolina. On an international basis I think your best free source for this data is the World Bank which about two years ago opened up all of its data. They used to have subscription-based databases and now they've made them free and open to the public. I've given you here the URL. They have a whole section on data but within the data section is one that's just for indicators. It covers 331 economic and social indicators for 214 countries. The date range is pretty broad from 1960 to 2011. It was originally published in English but it has been translated into the languages you see around the chart. Data is available by topic or by country and you can download it into Excel. Here is the chart showing GDP by country. So you'll notice that the country names are arranged on the left hand side in alphabetical order. Across the top you've got the years broken into ranges because otherwise the database would stretch out too wide to appreciate the value or I'll see all of the data. So what we're looking at is the 2008 to 2012 range here and you'll see at the end of each row it gives you a little trend line for the four years presented which is very handy. We're looking at the table. We could also map this. We could also graph it and if you look at the little X up here you can embed this chart. So if you're working with lib guides or web pages for classes or for other purposes you can embed this whole chart and then once it's embedded you can scroll down through all the other countries that are as I said arranged in alphabetical order. So they've made the data very accessible. If you want to see prior years you would just go up here to the top and click on the relevant date range. When you download into Excel you get all of the years for all of the countries so it's a pretty big Excel spreadsheet. Then let's move on to inflation and we talk about two different kinds of inflation. Consumer price index represents inflation on consumer products and the producer price index obviously is for producer items. These are the two main measures of inflation that we see reported and that legislators and investors use. The CPI is a measure of the average change over time in the prices paid by urban consumers for a market basket of consumer goods and services. It's established by the Bureau of Labor Statistics and they are the ones who gather and publish this data. It's presented as an index so the average of the years from 82 to 84 equal 100 and price changes are indexed against those price levels. Here are the components of the CPI. Each of these items is considered part of that basket of consumer goods that an average consumer or consuming family might purchase throughout the year. CPI is available for each of these categories individually or just the main CPI covers a combined inflation rate that incorporates all of these categories. Here is a chart from Fred showing the CPI from 1947 through the end of 2012. You'll see up here it gives you the title. This is the CPI for all urban consumers for all items. You'll see that the most recent index number was 232.770. It gives you the index base. It tells you that this data was collected monthly and it's seasonally adjusted and the last date on which it was updated. Again, the gray bars represent periods of recession and you can see prices fell during the recession pretty sharply right here. We could edit this graph and in doing so we could change the date range covered. We could change the presentation from a line graph to a bar graph and edit in other ways. You've got export or saving tools here, print, PDF or save and you can also download the data if, for instance, you have a patron who wants to do his or her own analysis on that data. You can just download the raw data in addition to saving the chart. The producer price index measures the average change over time in the selling prices received by domestic producers for their output. This is another measure that is collected and published by the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the PPI is reported here at BLS.gov. In fact, there is a whole website within the BLS that will give you data over time methodology definitions. There's a lot of information there. Think of a PPI as a leading indicator for consumer inflation. If a car company is seeing rising prices in steel, the consumer will see a rising price for the automobile they want to purchase. So PPI is kind of a leading indicator of how things are coming for us consumers. It's reported for 18 different categories including finished goods, intermediate materials, industrial commodities and a number of other things. And you can see the PPI for each of those categories just as we could for the CPI. And like the CPI, the data is indexed with 1982 equaling 100. So the best sources for PPI are the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the original source, and FRED. Now I found that the Bureau of Labor Statistics had lots of tables but not many graphs whereas FRED had both the tables and the graphs. So now let's talk about employment and unemployment. And you might think that employment plus unemployment equals all of the adults in the U.S. But that's not really true. The BLS, Bureau of Labor Statistics, measures employment as people who are employed and earning a wage. And they report tons of other data such as employment by occupation, hours worked, wages paid, labor demand and turnover, and the dynamic state of the labor market. And again, they've got a whole website within their website and that's at BLS.gov slash CES which stands for Current Employment Statistics. So from their site, I've downloaded a table showing employment, total non-farm, private employment for the years 2003 to 2013 reported by months. And I look at this and boy, I haven't trouble seeing trends. It's a ton of data. If I wanted to do some analysis, I would want that data. But for me, it's just so much easier to see trends when I look at a graph. So here's a graph of total non-farm private employment in thousands from 2003 to 2013. Now the slope here looks pretty dramatic. You have to make sure you look over here at the axis. So it's a pretty narrow axis but it's still the trend is more visible here than it was in that data table. Unemployment is defined as a person who is not employed, who is actively looking for work and is currently available to work. People who are not working and are waiting to be recalled from a job from which they've been temporarily laid off are also included in the statistics for unemployment. But receiving unemployment benefits has no bearing on whether a person is classified as unemployed. And that's per the definition on the BLS site. The unemployment rate represents the number of unemployed people as a percent of the labor force. And last month, February 2013, employment was down to 7.7%. Good sources for unemployment statistics. Again, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the Originating Agency, and our old friend Fred. Here is a Fred chart showing civilian unemployment rate, which is currently at 7.7%. So they give you the number here. They give you the date. Here are your periods of inflation. Look how unemployment jumped during that 2008 to 2009 recession. Pretty steep unemployment and now unemployment is falling, which is a good thing. So for the national economy, we've looked at indicators for gross domestic product, the value of all those products and services produced, inflation, employment and unemployment. And we saw that the best sources were the Bureau of Economic Analysis, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis' Database Fred, and the World Bank. So the next area that I want to talk with you about is the financial environment. And it works hand in hand with the national economy, supports it. I want to talk about the national debt. And we've heard a lot about that in the last six months with all of the discussions about the debt limit. We'll look at sources for the balance of the total debt and the debt service. And then we'll look a little bit at stock market data for closing prices and trends. According to the U.S. Treasury, the term national debt refers to direct liabilities of the U.S. government. And while there are several different concepts of debt, they are generally collected under the term public debt, which is the most significant form. And it exists in the form of U.S. Treasury securities, primarily bills, notes and bonds, saving bonds, and special securities issued to state and local governments. As of two days ago, our national debt was $11.9 trillion. There's a site called Treasury Direct, which provides a tool that lets you look at the amount of the national debt on a date or over a time range that you can specify. It's an interactive site that was very helpful. And the U.S. Treasury is the originating agency for this data. If you have a mortgage, you already know the components of debt consist of the principal, which is the amount you borrowed, and then there's the interest on the debt, which is sometimes called the debt service. And if we go back to Fred and we look at total public debt at the end of 2012 Q4, here's a graph of the national debt. So from, say, 1966 or 67 up through the end of 2012, again, here's that gray bar showing you our most recent recession and how public debt rose during that period. And here is a graph showing you federal outlays for interest payments on the debt beginning in 1940 through the end of this year in millions of dollars, but that's an interesting pattern there. So this is the debt service or the interest on the debt. Now, we have two main stock exchanges here in the U.S. We've got the New York Stock Exchange, which was recently bought by its European counterpart. It's now called the NYSC EuroNext, and we have the NASDAQ. Historically, the New York Stock Exchange is older and has an image of having the larger, older, very well-established companies listed there. The NASDAQ is the younger of the two stock exchanges, and there you'll find many of the younger or technology-based companies that are newer themselves. Within the New York Stock Exchange, we usually look at different indices within the companies that are listed there, because there are many companies listed there, but they've been clustered into indices that are proxies for how are things going generally on the stock market. The two better known are the Dow Jones industrials, which consists of industrial-based companies, and the S&P 500, established by Standard & Poor's, and it is 500 companies that kind of represent the economy. And when they remove a company from the S&P 500 and replace it, it usually gets a lot of attention. So sometimes you'll hear about older industrial companies rolling off and newer companies rolling on. There are lots of sources for S&P 500. None of them is government-based, because we're talking about private enterprise here. This is not government-gathered data, but NYSE.com provides the data. Yahoo Finance has the data. The Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, there are lots of sources for S&P 500 data. But our friend Fred also has it, and here's the stock price closing prices for the S&P 500 from Fred. And you can see how stock prices or the index overall fell during the recent recession and were in a period of recovery. And if you've been following the news last week, everybody was pretty excited when it topped 1400, you know, the index. So the prices hit 14,000, I guess, and it was a new high since the beginning of the recession. So you can see the peaks here just about match. Here's an example of what the NASDAQ chart looks like at Yahoo Finance. Here are your prices up here, and down here what you're seeing is an indication of volume of shares traded. I've used their interactive chart feature to select the five-year chart. The default is the one-day chart to show you how things are going just today. But we could have specified a custom date range had we chosen to. And you can see over that five-year period, we enjoyed a 43.84% increase in the NASDAQ composite. So you've got your prices here, and you can see you've got options here for downloading data, comparing. So we could add individual stocks and compare them to the NASDAQ composite, or we could reset the date range. So those are the main indicators that I wanted to cover, the national economy as well as the financial sector. We had a question about how people who are not working but are not available are not looking categorized. They're not. They're in neither number. They're just in the population number. So somebody who's neither working nor looking for work is included in the population, but they would not be counted as either employed nor as unemployed. So there's no separate statistics for them, for those who have just kind of dropped out. They are starting to keep some statistics on discouraged workers, and some folks think they should be gathering data on underemployed persons. People who are working part-time, who would like to be working full-time, or who are underemployed by virtue of the type of work they're doing relative to their experience and education. But other than the discouraged workers, there's no precise measure of people who have just decided to give up altogether. There's another question from Holly about the same thing. Where are the discouraged workers that's kept is her question. Bureau of Labor Statistics. If you go to the page on the Bureau of Labor Statistics, they've got on the left-hand side a list of subjects, and you can pick unemployed and discouraged workers are within the unemployed subject area. We have from Alberto, he's asking the difference between the GNP and the GDP. Well, GNP stands for Gross National Product. As far as I know, everybody switched from GNP to GDP about, what, 10 years ago? I think they just quit using the term. I don't see GNP listed anymore. And then Paula Campbell is just going to issue the interjecting that Fred has the most recent revisions of the GDP, whereas Alfred has the older figures. Right. Alfred is archival. Cool. Thank you. Jenny just said in here, GNP became less used about 1990, investment from other national, non-national. And finally, I want to say a big thank you for Mary doing this. This is really great intro to the economic indicators.