Fed policymakers must assess the stance of monetary policy each time they decide whether the target federal funds rate should be changed. Several different benchmark, or “natural,” interest rates have been suggested for this purpose. The gap between the target funds rate and the natural rate...

Using readily available indicators of the profitability, price, and availability of credit—the term spread, junk‐bond spread, and banks’ “willingness to lend” as reported by the Federal Reserve—we show that it is possible to significantly improve on the real‐time output and...

We distinguish between three different ways of using real-time data to estimate forecasting equations and argue that the most frequently used approach should generally be avoided. The point is illustrated with a model that uses monthly observations of industrial production, employment, and...

The authors forecast current-quarter real GDP growth using monthly data that would have been available to an analyst in real time. They demonstrate that using real-time data is of major importance both when estimating GDP forecasting models and when evaluating their performance. Moreover, the...