Insights Into Economic Data and Research
Insights and commentary on recent economic data and research, from NerdWallet's Senior Economist Elizabeth Renter.
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July 16, 2025: Economic Impact of an “Uncertainty” Surge Across Fed Districts
Like consumer sentiment surveys can provide a glimpse into economic attitudes at the household level, the Beige Book provides qualitative insights into decision-making and concerns among local business owners and organizations. Increasing economic uncertainty displayed in this anecdotal report could very well show up as overall slowing in the hard economic data as the sentiment spreads and financial decisions are placed on-hold.
Variations on the word “uncertainty” appeared 65 times in July’s volume of the Federal Reserve’s Beige Book — a publication featuring anecdotal reports on the economy from across the 12 Federal Reserve Districts. This compared to 14 times in July of last year.
“Uncertainty” has been repeated ad nauseum, in the headlines, by economists and even by the Central Bank — it was mentioned 28 times in roughly 13 pages of the FOMC’s latest meeting minutes. The potential sources of economic uncertainty are many right now, but arguably the biggest is trade policy. A lack of clarity on tariff timing, magnitude and possible reactions is making it difficult to plan for the potential fallout.
There is ample academic literature detailing how economic uncertainty impacts the economy at large. In short: Players in the economy make financial decisions based on their expectations of the future. Greater uncertainty means cloudy expectations.
When decision-makers can’t predict where the economy is headed, they’re likely to wait for more information. This is true whether they’re the Central Bank, a local small business deciding whether to hire one more worker or a large corporation thinking about expansion. In this way, rising and continued high economic uncertainty can slow overall economic growth via stagnating investments and employment.
The word “uncertainty” (or variations of it) have appeared in the Beige Book 22 times, on average, since January 2020. The frequency of the word rose dramatically in April, hitting 90, before decreasing slightly to 81 in May and 65 in July, after accounting for variation in the report’s total word count.
The Federal Reserve’s Beige Books are a rich source of economic information released eight times each year. The roughly 30-50 page volumes are made up of interview and questionnaire insights from businesses, economists and other organizations, detailing their economic conditions and developments in the area. This qualitative information isn’t what we typically think of when we think of economic data, but it provides useful boots-on-the-ground intel on issues that may eventually make their way into the hard economic data.
Excerpts from the July Beige Book:
“Hiring remained generally cautious, which many contacts attributed to ongoing economic and policy uncertainty.”
“Looking ahead, many contacts expected to postpone major hiring and layoff decisions until uncertainty diminished.”
“Hiring proceeded cautiously in part because of ongoing policy uncertainty and was concentrated among select manufacturing and IT services firms.”
“Uncertainty about tariffs and trade policy remained a challenge for manufacturers, and many contacts mentioned difficulty setting prices and finalizing contracts and purchase agreements.”
Methodology note: I used the programming language R to analyze frequency of key words and their variations across pdf Beige Book files, rebasing the raw figures to account for variations in Beige Book length.
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June 26, 2025: Is Federal Data In Trouble?
Federal statistics are the bedrock of good information and effective funding flowing across the country and to its people. But dispersed federal statistical agencies are vulnerable and underfunded, and could be facing real eventual data quality issues as a result.
The federal statistical system is decentralized, spread across numerous agencies that produce countless data products on everything from income, spending and joblessness to housing and education. These agencies rely on statistical experts analyzing surveys and administrative data on people, places, state and local governments, and businesses. The resulting products inform effective policy, as well as compelling journalism.
But all is not well across these statistical agencies. The professional autonomy of some of these agencies is protected by statute and organizational structure. The others could be at risk of potential political pressure. Further, many of these agencies have gone underfunded for years. These aren’t entirely new developments, though the risks have grown under shifting federal priorities.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics, one of the nation’s 13 principal statistical agencies, can help illustrate.
The requested budget for the BLS for fiscal year 2026 is $648 million, a decrease of 8% from the previous year. In fact, though the annual inflation rate has averaged 2.5% over the past two decades, the annual budget for this single agency has grown 1.5%, on average. In other words, the agency has less purchasing power each year. This evolved over a period where technology and innovation could have spurred major improvements for the agency’s practices. However, during this time, response rates to BLS surveys have fallen and some data products offered by the agency have been suspended entirely.
The results of underfunding
From 2015 to 2025, response rates to the Current Population Survey, a household survey that provides the unemployment rate, among other things — has fallen from 88% to 68%. During this period, initial responses to the Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey (JOLTS) — a business survey that measures hiring and openings, among other things — has fallen from 67% to 35%. Though the agency takes steps to account for these smaller sample sizes, a lack of funding limits modernization that could increase responses and otherwise further help.
Adherence to strict data quality measures means that declining resources are more likely to end in the suspension of some products, rather than corner-cutting. Thus far this year, the BLS has announced the elimination of 350 different Producer Price Indexes (PPI), which were used to measure pricing changes received by producers. The BLS also announced eliminating a handful of mid-sized cities from the consumer inflation data collection process. Further, the agency is suspending a program that allows researchers to access restricted data and several advisory committees have been terminated.
Policy and the administration of government programs depend on objective, high-quality federal data, to say the very least. But journalists, economists and people across the economy depend on this data, too.
In 2016, I was invited to travel to Washington, D.C., as part of the Goldschmidt Fellowship. Like a nerdy field trip, the fellows met with statisticians across federal statistical agencies over the course of a week. Before then, I saw federal statistics as a way to bolster or shape a story. But after, I really began to see them as the people’s data, and saw my role to analyze and glean findings from it that could prove helpful to folks — giving the data back to its source, as it were.
Now, as an economist, I still see myself as a purveyor of data stories, but also as someone who relies on these agencies to publish reliable data from which to gauge the health and direction of the economy. I have great faith in the experts at these agencies to do high-quality work and produce accurate data, but the absence of protection against political influence and years of inadequate funding put them at risk.
Related NerdWallet Work Utilizing Federal Data:
Quarterly analysis on first-time home buyer affordability (BLS, U.S. Census)
Home improvement spending hits $827 billion (U.S. Census)
May 30, 2025: Recession Indicators — the Real, the Correlations and the Just-For-Fun
Consumers and economists understand the concept of economic recession in different ways. Though the general public may play a bit fast and loose with defining the term recession, it doesn’t mean their sentiment is invalid. In fact, some of the tongue-in-cheek “recession indicators” trending on social media could offer clues to what’s happening in today’s economy before it shows up in the official data.
On April 6, Google search volume for “are we in a recession?” hit a level not surpassed since summer 2022, when we were also not in a recession. Unsurprisingly, Google searches for recession terms are correlated with negative consumer sentiment. When consumers feel bad about the economy, they seek external validation for those feelings.
In July 2024, 60% of Americans said we were in a recession, according to a NerdWallet survey at the time. We were not, though sentiment was low.
The final say on whether we’re in a recession lies with the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) Business Cycle Dating Committee, which identifies economic peaks and troughs. However, their identification of a recession is backward looking — we don’t know we’re in it until well after it’s started (and sometimes, after it’s over). So in real time, people may look for expert opinions (or social media influencers) to stand in for what the NBER may later tell them.
The real indicators: Economic data sources and models provide some of the clearest information on whether we’re in a downturn that warrants the recession label. Many of these are measures the NBER considers in its own determinations, including the unemployment rate, job growth, consumer spending and industrial production, for example. In addition, there are rules-of-thumb that might tell us whether we’re in a recession or one is coming. These include, among others, an inverted yield curve, two consecutive quarters of negative GDP growth and the Sahm rule, named after economist Claudia Sahm.
Potentially meaningful (non-economic) correlations: On social media, some trends being cited as recession indicators could be signals of a pullback in consumer spending, including DIY manicures, lower-maintenance hairstyles and budget-friendly at-home cooking. Even though TikTokers and YouTubers aren’t representative of the U.S. consumer as a whole, if they’re highlighting things happening more broadly, they could represent leading indicators for what we eventually see in spending aggregates, such as the monthly retail trade figures from the U.S. Census.
Purely entertainment: Many of the recession trends currently popping up on social media seem to be little more than nostalgia, and may be as much about finding solace in simpler times as anything related to the economy — think recession pop (welcome back, Kesha) and fashion that resembles what we were wearing during the Great Recession. Further, many actual correlations (hem lengths, I’m looking at you) are not predictive and could be purely coincidence. For example, the fact that viewership rates of “The Big Bang Theory” are moderately correlated with GDP growth doesn’t mean we should watch that data point as a potential indicator of the health of our economy.
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May 6, 2025: Souring Sentiment - Why Now is Different
Falling consumer economic sentiment is likely to impact future saving and spending decisions, and we’ll see these decisions make their way into the official economic data in months to come. But this isn’t the first time in recent history that people have felt bad about the economy. The difference is this time they’re lacking the protection of excess savings, low debt levels and a labor market more favorable to workers.
Consumer economic sentiment has been suffering, according to surveys from the University of Michigan and The Conference Board, two of the most well-known sources of such data. And some consumers may already be taking action — an overwhelming majority of Americans (87%) say they’ll change their financial strategy over the next 12 months because of the Trump Administration’s tariffs, according to a recent NerdWallet survey.
Just a few years ago, we saw similar lackluster consumer sentiment, but that didn’t bleed into the real data. The difference? Household financial situations. We could spend a lot of time unpacking why people felt bad when the economy was good in 2022 and into 2023 (I did some of that here). But their spending behavior didn’t change to match that sentiment because, on average, they still had excess savings, recent equity growth and a labor market biased in favor of workers. Now? Well, now that excess savings has been spent down, the stock market is particularly volatile, debt balances are up and accounts increasingly delinquent, the job market isn’t benefitting those in need of work and there is so much risk on the horizon.
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May 5, 2025: Unemployment Among Recent College Grads
Despite recent college graduates having a particularly tough time in the current job market, the most recent research indicates a postsecondary education still provides a good return on investment, long-term. From the time they begin their college career, students should be preparing for their exit — student loan debt, a gap before employment and a lower-than-ideal starting wage may be their initial realities. But a cautious approach to borrowing along with establishing fail-safes and solid support systems can make their entry into the professional world a bit easier.
The unemployment rate of recent college graduates (ages 22-27) is near 6% as of March 2025, according to the Current Population Survey. That’s higher than the overall unemployment rate (4%). Historically, the jobless rate of recent grads has been lower than the “all workers” rate. That first began to change around 2018, and since 2022 those rates have diverged further.
The BLS also publishes an annual release of related data, in greater detail. In that, the agency reports the unemployment rate of recent bachelor’s degree recipients (ages 20-29) to have been 15.3% in 2024.
Still, a college degree remains a good investment, for most. Recent research from the New York Fed indicates an annual wage premium of more than $30,000 for college graduates, though mileage varies based on the time spent achieving that degree and choice of majors.
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