Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas

Special questions this quarter ask about expectations for U.S. electric vehicle sales, purchases of carbon credits and/or carbon offsets, COVID-19-related operational delays and hiring challenges.

The par value of government debt, which is reported by the U.S. Treasury Department, reflects interest rates at the time the debt was issued while the market value is adjusted to reflect market interest rates as of the observed period. Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas researchers calculated the market value of U.S. government debt series until October 2010. In March 2013, the source of market interest rates was changed and updating resumed. See the methodology description for more detail. Par and market values are reported for gross federal debt (all debt issued by the Treasury), privately held gross federal debt (that not held in U.S. government accounts or by the Federal Reserve) and marketable Treasury debt (Treasury bills, notes and bonds). Values reported are for the last business day of the month. The market value of marketable Treasury debt is an accounting exercise, while the other two require an assumption about the price of nonmarketable debt.

Note: The source has discontinued this dataset with note-"With the discontinuation of the database that is the input for the MEI, we will no longer update the index after March 31, 2021. For questions, please contact Tyler Atkinson ( tyler.atkinson@dal.frb.org < tyler.atkinson@dal.frb.org>;)"   The Dallas Fed Mobility and Engagement Index (formerly the “Social Distancing Index”) summarizes the information in seven different variables based on geolocation data collected from a large sample of mobile devices to gain insight into the economic impact of the pandemic. The Mobility and Engagement Index measures the deviation from normal mobility behaviors induced by COVID-19. The updated name recognizes that social distancing, or the limiting of close contact with others outside your household, can be practiced while mobility and engagement improve. Along with revising the index’s name, we also changed the sign of the index to make it more intuitive as a measure of mobility and engagement. The underlying data is provided by SafeGraph. The national series is aggregated from county-level data with device counts as weights. Similar for the states. In the county files, the county name is in the first row, with FIPS code in the variable name. MSA data are for metro statistical areas (MSA), aggregated from county data using the March 2020. MSA names are in the first row, and CBSA codes in the variable name. The index is scaled so that the average of January-February is zero, and the lowest weekly value (week ended April 11) is -100. File names including 'weekly' are averages of the daily data. The data corresponds to the last day of the calendar week.

In the fourth quarter 2010 issue of Southwest Economy, Dallas Fed researchers introduced new measures of real trade-weighted exchange rates for each of the 50 U.S. states. These indexes calculate the inflation-adjusted value of the U.S. dollar against the currencies of countries with which the state trades. The real exchange rates are aggregated across countries for each state using the average export share to the country over the period from 1997 to 2009. The indexes should allow analysts to more precisely identify the exchange rate movements that most affect demand for a state’s exports.

The Trimmed Mean PCE inflation rate is an alternative measure of core inflation in the price index for personal consumption expenditures (PCE). It is calculated by staff at the Dallas Fed, using data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA).