The Chicago Fed's Project Hometown initiative hosted a panel discussion on Wednesday, July 29, that brought together practitioners and researchers to explore the challenges faced by Chicago's minority neighborhoods. Panelists discussed how these communities can recover from both long-standing inequities as well as the current pandemic, restoring their status as vital and vibrant communities on Ch... Read More

In a previous Chicago Fed Insights blog post, we took a closer look at what drives the correlation between Google Trends unemployment topic indexes1 and state initial unemployment insurance (UI) claims at the U.S. metro area level. We found that the positive correlation between Google search intensity for unemployment-related terms and the rate of UI take-up during the Covid-19 pandemic was p... Read More

The Chicago Fed hosted a community forum on Wednesday, July 1, that brought together government, civic, health, and business leaders to share their visions for how Chicago recovers from the Covid-19 crisis and rebuilds its economy. The discussion underscored the urgent need for Chicago to tackle its longstanding challenges of providing equal opportunity (especially in education and jobs), com... Read More

This blog post1 is the fifth in a series that discusses how the current pandemic affects the financial positions of publicly traded U.S. corporations, the potential implications of these financial developments, and the federal policy response. In this post, we study the economic benefits and costs of the Main Street Lending Program, created by the Federal Reserve to support c... Read More

Since the onset of the pandemic, there has been growing interest in tracking labor market activity with “big data” sources like Google Trends.1 Just as an example, one can track how the number of Google searches with the term unemployment office has changed over the past week for the Chicago metro area or explore how unemployment became one of the top searched issues across the U.S. during th... Read More

On June 8, 2020, the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) issued a statement announcing that its Business Cycle Dating Committee determined U.S. economic activity had reached a cyclical peak in February 2020. Beginning in March 2020, a multitude of economic indicators declined sharply as public health orders that required nonessential businesses to close were implemented during the ear... Read More

This blog post is the fourth in a series that discusses how the current pandemic affects the financial positions of publicly traded U.S. corporations, the potential implications of these financial developments, and the federal policy response. In this post, we discuss the adjustments to federal tax policy that have been initiated to support U.S. businesses and their possible effects. These me... Read More

This blog post is the third in a series that discusses how the current pandemic affects the financial positions of publicly traded U.S. corporations, the potential implications of these financial developments, and the federal policy response. In this post, we attempt to quantify the risk to the solvency and to the liquidity of U.S. public corporations, and how this risk can be reduced or... Read More

This blog is the second in a series that discusses how the current pandemic affects the financial positions of publicly traded U.S. corporations, the potential implications of these financial developments, and the federal policy response. The first blog discussed the financial positions before the pandemic started. It documented that many nonfinancial publicly traded companies entered 20... Read More

This blog is the first in a series that will discuss how the current pandemic affects the financial positions of publicly traded U.S. corporations, the potential implications of these financial developments, and the federal policy response. This first blog discusses the financial positions before the pandemic started. We document three facts: (1) the share of nonfinancial public companies wit... Read More