Gardner Intelligence is firmly committed to helping the manufacturing community in any way possible, including by sharing data from other sources.  To help business-owners and decision makers as they navigate through this challenging time we therefore are recommending to our readers the Federal Reserve’s Weekly Economic Index (WEI). The WEI is a short-term indicator that provides excellent data for rapidly-changing economic activities, such as we find in the current COVID-19 pandemic.

As described by the Federal Reserve, the WEI is “...a composite of 10 weekly economic indicators: Redbook same-store sales, Rasmussen Consumer Index, new claims for unemployment insurance, continued claims for unemployment insurance, adjusted income/employment tax withholdings (from Booth Financial Consulting), railroad traffic originated (from the Association of American Railroads), the American Staffing Association Staffing Index, steel production, wholesale sales of gasoline, diesel, and jet fuel, and weekly average US electricity load (with remaining data supplied by Haver Analytics). All series are represented as year-over-year percentage changes. These series are combined into a single index of weekly economic activity.”

In our efforts to support every manufacturer’s efforts to be a data-driven decision maker and leader, we believe that data series with short reporting intervals will serve as an excellent resource for helping manufacturers to navigate their businesses through this volatile time.  Although such data resources at present are merely quantifying the magnitude of the present economic slowdown, these same indicators will in the future be extremely useful in gauging the timing and magnitude of the inevitable rebound in both the U.S. and world economies.  For more information about the WEI visit the Federal Reserve’s Economic Research website at: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/WEI