Chicago Fed National Activity Index (CFNAI)

The Chicago Fed National Activity Index (CFNAI) is a monthly index designed to better gauge overall economic activity and inflationary pressure. The CFNAI is released at 8:30 a.m. ET on scheduled days, normally toward the end of each calendar month.

Latest CFNAI News Release

Economic activity approaching pre-recessionary levels
The Chicago Fed National Activity Index was −0.81 in September, down from −0.65 in August. Three of the four broad categories of indicators made negative contributions to the index in September, but the production and income category made a positive contribution for the third consecutive month. The index's three-month moving average, CFNAI-MA3, in September improved to a level greater than −0.7 for the first time since the early months of this recession. (PDF,130KB) Please see the recent Chicago Fed Letter for further analysis of the CFNAI and business cycles. (PDF,293KB)

Background on the CFNAI

The CFNAI is a weighted average of 85 existing monthly indicators of national economic activity. It is constructed to have an average value of zero and a standard deviation of one. Since economic activity tends toward trend growth rate over time, a positive index reading corresponds to growth above trend and a negative index reading corresponds to growth below trend. (PDF,19KB)

Subscribe

Register for e-mail alerts about CFNAI

More on the CFNAI

The 85 economic indicators that are included in the CFNAI are drawn from four broad categories of data: production and income; employment, unemployment, and hours; personal consumption and housing; and sales, orders, and inventories. Each of these data series measures some aspect of overall macroeconomic activity. The derived index provides a single, summary measure of a factor common to these national economic data.

The CFNAI corresponds to the index of economic activity developed by James Stock of Harvard University and Mark Watson of Princeton University in an article, "Forecasting Inflation," published in the Journal of Monetary Economics in 1999. The idea behind their approach is that there is some factor common to all of the various inflation indicators, and it is this common factor, or index, that is useful for predicting inflation. Research has found that the CFNAI provides a useful gauge on current and future economic activity and inflation in the United States.