Outstanding loan volume at commercial banks declined 2.2 percent between June 2008 and June 2009.

In general, the reasons for bank failures today are the same as failures in the past.

Inflation expectations formed in the mid-2000s weren’t very accurate—in large part because of the shocks from the recession and financial crisis.

The U.S. economy lost some of its momentum over the winter. But the weakness did not extend to the labor markets, where job gains continued to be strong.

The acceleration of productivity growth during the latter half of the 1990s was both the defining economic event of the decade and a major topic of debate among Federal Reserve policymakers. A key aspect of the debate was the conflict between incoming aggregate data, which initially suggested...

Decision makers, both public and private, use forecasts of economic growth and inflation to make plans and implement policies. In many situations, reasonably good forecasts can be made with simple rules of thumb that are extrapolations of a single data series. In principle, information about...