Global| Apr 10 2020State Coincident Indexes in February
|in:Viewpoints
Summary
The Philadelphia Federal Reserve Bank has issued estimates of state coincident indexes for February. This is essentially the last comprehensive snapshot of the distribution of activity prior to the impact of the pandemic. A look at [...]
The Philadelphia Federal Reserve Bank has issued estimates of state coincident indexes for February. This is essentially the last comprehensive snapshot of the distribution of activity prior to the impact of the pandemic. A look at the medium and longer-term developments seems fairly off the point. In the short-term, Arizona and Maine experienced declines from January to February (the fall in Arizona was so modest that in the Bank's report it is chalked up as "unchanged"); Maine was the only state to experience a three-month drop. The coincident indexes depend heavily on labor market data, with some smoothing of current developments. One suspects that bad as the March figures are likely to be, they could well be revised down when the raw information for April gets factored in.
Charles Steindel
AuthorMore in Author Profile »Charles Steindel has been editor of Business Economics, the journal of the National Association for Business Economics, since 2016. From 2014 to 2021 he was Resident Scholar at the Anisfield School of Business, Ramapo College of New Jersey. From 2010 to 2014 he was the first Chief Economist of the New Jersey Department of the Treasury, with responsibilities for economic and revenue projections and analysis of state economic policy. He came to the Treasury after a long career at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, where he played a major role in forecasting and policy advice and rose to the rank of Senior Vice-President. He has served in leadership positions in a number of professional organizations. In 2011 he received the William F. Butler Award from the New York Association for Business Economics, is a fellow of NABE and of the Money Marketeers of New York University, and has received several awards for articles published in Business Economics. In 2017 he delivered Ramapo College's Sebastian J. Raciti Memorial Lecture. He is a member of the panel for the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia's Survey of Professional Forecasters and of the Committee on Research in Income and Wealth. He has published papers in a range of areas, and is the author of Economic Indicators for Professionals: Putting the Statistics into Perspective. He received his bachelor's degree from Emory University, his Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and is a National Association for Business Economics Certified Business EconomistTM.