The Federal Reserve System's Weekly
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4"&/P+VMZ Studies in Applied Economics 5)&'&%&3"-3&4&37& 4:45&.h48&&,-:#"-"/$& 4)&&54*/$& $FDJMJB#BP +VTUJO$IFO /JDIPMBT'SJFT "OESFX(JCTPO &NNB1BJOF BOE,VSU4DIVMFS +PIOT)PQLJOT*OTUJUVUFGPS"QQMJFE&DPOPNJDT (MPCBM)FBMUI BOEUIF4UVEZPG#VTJOFTT&OUFSQSJTF $FOUFSGPS'JOBODJBM4UBCJMJUZ The Federal Reserve System’s Weekly Balance Sheet since 1914 By Cecilia Bao, Justin Chen, Nicholas Fries, Andrew Gibson, Emma Paine, and Kurt Schuler Copyright 2018 by the authors. The text of this paper may be reproduced or adapted provided that no fee is charged and the original source is properly credited. The same conditions also apply to reproduction from the accompanying spreadsheet workbook of any quantity of data points in a graph without accompanying numbers, or up to 1,000 data points as numbers. Reproduction of more than 1,000 data points as numbers requires the permission of the authors; contact Kurt Schuler ([email protected]). About the Series The Studies in Applied Economics series is under the general direction of Professor Steve H. Hanke, co-director of the Johns Hopkins Institute for Applied Economics, Global Health, and the Study of Business Enterprise ([email protected]). The authors are mainly students at The Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. Some performed their work as research assistants at the Institute. This paper is issued jointly with the Center for Financial Stability. About the Authors Cecilia Bao, Justin Chen, Nicholas Fries, and Emma Paine are undergraduate students at The Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, while Andrew Gibson is a recent graduate. Kurt Schuler is Senior Fellow in Financial History at the Center for Financial Stability in New York City. Abstract We present the first full digitized data of the Federal Reserve System’s system-wide weekly balance sheet from its beginning in 1914 in an accompanying spreadsheet workbook. The data will be of interest to anyone wishing to study the Fed’s monetary policy from a quantitative perspective. Keywords: Federal Reserve System, Fed, balance sheet, assets, liabilities, gold, H.4.1 release JEL codes: E51, E58, N22 1 The Federal Reserve System is the world’s most influential central bank. Even so, its system- wide weekly balance sheet, a basic source of information for studying its activities, has never been available in machine-readable form back to the beginning of its operations in 1914. The balance sheet is the Federal Reserve’s most important tool for determining the supply of money; most of its other tools, such as the policy interest rate, reserve requirements, and communicating its policy, aim to influence the demand for money. Balance sheet data are therefore essential for understanding how and why the Fed has succeeded and failed with various policies, and weekly data permit greater precision in analyzing turning points in monetary policy than is possible with the monthly data that were previously the highest frequency available in machine-readable form in the Fed’s early and middle decades. In an accompanying spreadsheet workbook we present both the original data and a simplified balance sheet covering the whole of the Fed’s history through early 2018. The data will be useful to a wide range of people, including economists, financial journalists, historians, investment professionals, policy makers, and monetary cranks. Three previous working papers digitized segments of the balance sheet from 1914-1941, 1942- 1975, and 1976-April 2018 (Chen and Gibson 2017, Bao and Paine 2018, and Fries 2018, respectively). The papers were written by undergraduate students of Prof. Steve H. Hanke at the suggestion of and advised by Kurt Schuler, who also did some preliminary digitization. Readers who want some analysis of the balance sheet should see those papers. This paper merely describes important considerations about the combined data. The accompanying spreadsheet workbook combines data from the three previous papers and corrects some errors that occurred during the tedious hand-entry of tens of thousands of data points. Anyone performing data analysis with the balance sheet should accordingly use the workbook accompanying this paper, not the workbooks accompanying the previous papers. Given the huge volume of writing on the Federal Reserve, including by many of the world’s most eminent economists over the last hundred years, it is mind-boggling that nobody has previously collected the Fed’s weekly balance sheet data from the beginning. (Weekly data for recent years and monthly or annual data for earlier years have however been available.) The computer power for digitizing the weekly data has been available to every professional economist in the United States for 30 years, and to economists at large universities for almost 30 years before that. That the task should finally be accomplished by a group of undergraduates and a nonacademic is a testimony to the reluctance of most economists to collect data even when viewing the sources does not involve getting up from the computer screen. IdentiFyinG inFormation on the data release: For more than 70 years the data release that contains the Fed’s balance sheet has been called the H.4.1 release. The title and identification number of the release have varied over the years as follows (Seldin 2016: 20). 1914-1919: Resources and Liabilities of the Federal Reserve Banks (B801) (title varied slightly) 1920-1946: Condition of Federal Reserve Banks (FR283) 1946-1955: Condition of Federal Reserve Banks (H.4.1) 2 1956-1961: Weekly Averages of Member Bank Reserves, Reserve Bank Credit, and Related Items and Statement of Condition of the Federal Reserve Banks (H.4.1) 1961-1980: Factors Affecting Bank Reserves and Condition Statement of Federal Reserve Banks (H.4.1) 1981-1984: Factors Affecting Reserves of Depository Institutions and Condition Statement of Federal Reserve Banks (H.4.1) 1984-1997: Factors Affecting Reserve Balances of Depository Institutions and Condition Statement of Federal Reserve Banks (H.4.1) 1997-present: H.4.1, Factors Affecting Reserve Balances of Depository Institutions and Condition Statement of Federal Reserve Banks The Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System gave its statistical releases the identifying letter “B” for Board in the early years, then “FR” for Federal Reserve, and finally letters from all through the alphabet. Releases beginning in “H” were generally weekly (Rua and Seldin 2016). The number and name of the table containing the balance sheet within the weekly release also have varied. Currently it is Table 5, “Consolidated Statement of Condition of All Federal Reserve Banks.” Sources: Early data can be conveniently found in Fed annual reports, from which Kurt Schuler cut and pasted data in partly automated fashion. We spot-checked data from the annual reports against the weekly statements and the Federal Reserve Bulletin. From 1927 to June 20, 1996, the authors other than Schuler hand-entered data week by week. Federal Reserve annual reports and H.4.1 press releases from before the Internet era are conveniently available online at FRASER, a service of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. Although the weekly releases apparently began in 1914 (Seldin 2016: 20), FRASER only has them starting from the end of 1915. The weekly releases however show data from a year earlier for comparison, so FRASER in effect has those data from the end of 1914 onward. FRASER is missing a few of the later weekly releases, but has the releases from the following week or the release from one year later, which show the levels or differences from the previous week or year and therefore can be used to calculate the missing figures. Data start to appear in weekly digitized form from June 27, 1996 on the Fed’s (that, is the Board of Governors’) Web site, though only as weekly statements and not combined into time series. Nicholas Fries assembled the individual weekly files into a spreadsheet. The Fed provides users of its Web site the ability to download time series data and create spreadsheets with H.4.1 data from December 18, 2002. The Fed has discontinued some series in the balance sheet, which can make searching for them a bit difficult if one does not know where to look. The accompanying spreadsheet lists the identifying codes the Fed uses for data published since December 18, 2002, so that future readers who wish to carry the data forward should be able to do so easily. 3 The Fed later revised some data, usually by amounts that were small compared to total assets or liabilities. We think we have caught many of the revisions for the period during which we had to enter data partly or totally by hand, which extends through December 11, 2002. Presumably the Fed’s downloadable data series starting December 18, 2002 are all corrected if there were errors in the original statements. Day of statement: Originally the statement showed the condition of Federal Reserve Banks as of Friday. Since April 27, 1921, the day of the statement (the “as-of” day) has been Wednesday. For federal holidays, the “as-of” day was typically moved a day earlier until 1951. Federal holidays include New Year’s Day (January 1), Washington’s Birthday (February 22), Memorial Day (May 30), Independence Day (July 4), Columbus Day (October 12), Armistice Day (now Veterans Day, November 11), and Christmas (December 25). During the period when the “as- of” day was Friday, Friday was often granted as a federal holiday if the actual holiday fell on Saturday. As time passed, the “as-of” date was less frequently changed to accommodate holidays, and apparently it has not been changed since January 1, 1986. The press release has typically been issued the day after the “as-of” date, but it too has often been moved a day later to accommodate holidays.