Windows on the Web

Bruce Kratofil is President of BJK Research, Cleveland OH. He is also webmaster of the NABE web site. He can be reached at brucek@bjkresearch.com

A style note: Any article talking about places to go on the Web is going to be cluttered with web site addresses, technically known as URLs (uniform resource locators). To try to reduce the clutter, most of the URLs have been moved to footnotes(not in online version). We will also take out the http:// part, and only give the full address if it is something different. There will also be an online version of all WoW articles, and these articles will be hot-linked, so that you can read and click, letting you jump instantly to the site discussed. This should be easier and more accurate than typing in the addresses yourself. The online version of this article will be at www.nabe.com/wow/wow9902.htm.

THE FEDERAL RESERVE ON THE WEB

As we all know, the Federal Reserve System is a bountiful source of information, almost all of it free for the asking. It is no different on the Web, as the Board of Governors and the twelve regional Banks all have well-developed web sites, offering up electronically the information that you can also get on paper. In most cases, these web sites have features similar to one another, including organizational information on the Fed, information on the services they provide to both financial institutions and consumers, data, and economic research.

Of special interest to NABE members, the district reserve banks have placed most of their research publications online, especially their Economic or Business Reviews. Almost all of the banks also have three to four years of back issues for the major publications available, as well as working papers, special studies, and the like. Most of these have been formatted as Adobe Acrobat® files rather than as regular web pages. For those who are unfamiliar, Acrobat files are portable electronic documents that mimic the layout and appearance of a paper-based document, but on the computer screen. Acrobat files have a number of advantages for sharing information electronically. They are cross-platform, so the same file can be viewed by Windows 95/98, Windows 3.x, Macintosh, DOS or Unix computers. They are fairly easy to produce (if you have purchased the software from Adobe). And best of all, a free Reader program is available for download from the Adobe Web site, so while it costs something to produce the documents, the only cost in consuming them is your time. The Acrobat Reader is a "must-have" tool to tap the resources of these web sites. There are also Acrobat plug-ins for both Netscape Navigator and Microsoft Internet Explorer, so that you can view the documents from within your browser while still online.

To help you find your way to the Fed’s information, we have set up the "Federal Reserve Corner"  on NABE.com to do two things: (1) We have developed a set of links to all of the Fed sites, as well as some of the more notable pages or features within a bank’s overall site: (2) we have set up what we term a Reading Room, which is a selection of recent noteworthy articles from the various research publications, with a brief description and link to the article, so they can be conveniently downloaded. Hopefully, this can both alert you to articles you may have missed and also save you a trip to the library. (If you would like to contribute suggestions to the Reading Room, send the article information, a brief description, and the URL if you have it, to me at brucek@bjkresearch.com.)

A Tour of the Sites

Because many of the Federal Reserve sites share the same features, this article won’t do a comprehensive listing of everything at each of the bank sites. They all have their research publications online; they all have links to other useful sites; they all have information about the Fed and how it works. What we will do is list some of the unique features found at some of the different banks. It’s not a comprehensive list, and there are probably some useful features that I haven’t mentioned. (If you know of any, let me know and I can add them to the page on the web site.) The best place to begin a tour is at the Board of Governors site. Two things you will find here are testimony and data.

Whenever Alan Greenspan or any of the Fed governors testifies before Congress, the prepared testimony is also simultaneously released online. The same is true for major speeches by one of the governors or some of the other high-ranking officials. Unfortunately, the online information typically only includes the prepared remarks and not the questions and answers afterwards. Greenspan’s congressional testimony of January 20, 1999, does not include his answers to questions about the Clinton Social Security Reform proposal, for instance. The minutes and transcripts of the Federal Open Market Committee, when released, as well as the Beige Book, can also be found here.

The data releases here mirror the ones that are reported in the Federal Reserve Bulletin. Interest rate averages are updated daily on the site, and there are weekly updates for reserves, the money supply, commercial bank assets and liabilities and exchange rates. You can also get the monthly releases for industrial production and capacity utilization, as well as consumer credit data. The quarterly updates to the Flow of Funds accounts, as well as historical data for the accounts, are also here.

If you are interested in a more extensive source of data, the place to go may be St. Louis. The St. Louis Fed  site contains FRED®, the Federal Reserve Economic Database, which has many data files for both real and financial time series, including GDP and component data, business and fiscal data, prices, employment, money supply, reserves, and exchange rates. Many of these time series go back to the 1940s and 1950s, and they are formatted as text files that, with only a little effort, can be parsed and imported into Excel or Lotus 1-2-3. You can also download a compressed file that contains all the series in a particular category, and there are macros for both Excel and 1-2-3 that let you compute growth rates for the time series.

If you want to search for articles rather than data, the San Francisco Fed  has a searchable online index called The Fed in Print. It allows you to search for articles from all Federal Reserve publications, by keyword, by title word, by author, by bank, by publication year, and by publication name. The search results are displayed as a list, and if the article is available online, there is a link so that you can jump to the article. To test it out, a search of the keywords "yield curve" for the years 1995 through 1997 turned up a list of twelve articles, some of which were working papers that probably would be difficult to find elsewhere.

Many banks develop some specialty interests on their web site. The Dallas Fed has the Center for Latin American Studies,   whose usefulness is somewhat diminished by the fact that it only seems to keep articles from the current issue online, rather than developing an archive. Minneapolis has a Center for Economic Literacy, including an online Test of Economic Literacy. You can look for this on the section labeled "Why Johnny Can’t Choose." There are also a number of papers discussing the best approach to teaching economics, especially in elementary classrooms and in the former Soviet-bloc countries. The Richmond Bank has a feature called Equilibria Chat where economics teachers can post questions that are then answered either by staffers or by the other readers.

There are many other things available at the thirteen Fed sites, and the sites are adding more features all the time. Use the Federal Reserve Corner as a jumping off point to start your explorations.

NEW AT NABE.COM

In addition to our Federal Reserve page, we have started a couple of other new features on Nabe.com. As Carolyn Scott told you in the January issue, there is a Consultants and Services Registry , where NABE members can run a classified ad describing themselves and their services. We hope that this becomes a useful marketing tool for members, as well as a first place to look for those shopping for economic services. While only NABE members can advertise on the list, the list itself is open for viewing by everyone.

The other feature is our expanded calendars. The NABE Calendar  now lists both NABE events as well as events from local chapters. There is also an Economic Data Calendar in the Members Section, which lists the economic data releases for the upcoming week, and if possible, links directly to the page at the agency where the data are. In addition to highlighting the upcoming week’s release, we will be keeping links to the releases for the previous month.

The Economic Data Calendar is the first step in an expanded Links section we are constructing on the web site that will serve as a guide to the most important economic data on the World Wide Web. This new set of links, and how to find your way around the government statistical agencies, will be the topic in the next issue.