Compare US economic measures

When several official measures describe the same thing, they rarely agree. These pages set them side by side: what each one measures, who publishes it, when it lands, and which to use.

• Six US house price measures comparedThe United States has no single house price number. Six widely quoted measures — Case-Shiller, FHFA, Zillow, Redfin, Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae — are built from different homes, different transactions and different methods, and they can disagree by several percentage points at the same moment.
• CPI or PCE: measuring US inflationThe United States publishes two headline inflation measures. The Federal Reserve targets PCE, the public and most contracts follow CPI, and the gap between them has usually run a few tenths of a percentage point.
• Five measures of US inflation expectationsMarkets, households and firms are each asked a different question about future inflation, and they answer differently. Knowing which measure is which matters, because central bankers watch some of them far more closely than others.
• Three measures of US job postingsJob openings are counted three different ways in the United States: by a government survey of employers, and by two private trackers reading the postings themselves. They agree on direction far more often than on level.
• Michigan or Conference Board sentimentThe two long-running US consumer surveys ask different people different questions. Michigan leans on personal finances, the Conference Board leans on the labour market, and that single difference explains most of the times they diverge.
• Reading the regional Fed factory surveysFive Reserve Banks publish a manufacturing survey weeks before the national data. They are diffusion indexes centred on zero, cover different districts, and are routinely over-read as forecasts of the ISM.
• Five US financial stress indicatorsWhen markets wobble, five indicators get quoted and they are built from completely different material: option prices, bank spreads, newspaper text and model residuals. Only some of them measure stress at all.
• Five US recession indicators comparedNo single series calls a US recession — the NBER does, often a year late. These are the five indicators used to guess in the meantime, and each has failed at least once in a way worth knowing about.
• Tracking the US economy weeklyGDP arrives a month after the quarter ends. Four indicators try to fill the gap with weekly or daily readings, and each buys its timeliness with a different compromise.
• Four ways to measure US wage growthUS wage growth has four official readings and they regularly disagree by a full percentage point. The reason is not measurement error — it is that only one of them holds the mix of jobs constant.
• Three measures of US rentRent enters the inflation statistics with a lag of about a year. That gap between market rents and measured shelter inflation was the single largest source of confusion about US inflation in the 2020s.
• WTI, Brent and the price at the pumpFour US energy prices are quoted daily and they are not interchangeable. The gap between a crude benchmark and the retail pump price is mostly tax, refining and distribution, and it changes slowly.
• US national debt: which number is whichThree different US debt figures circulate and they differ by trillions. The gap is not disagreement — it is that one of them counts money the government owes itself.
• Four ways to read US freightFreight is the oldest real-time proxy for the goods economy. Four independent measures cover it — trucking, rail, ports and road miles — and they answer different questions about whether things are moving.
• U-3, U-6 and the rest of the jobs reportThe US unemployment rate everyone quotes is one of six official measures, and it excludes people who want work but stopped looking. In some cycles the measures it excludes tell the more important story.