The Fed’s Weekly Balance Sheet since 1976

Students of CFS Special Counselor Steve Hanke have previously written two papers digitizing the weekly balance sheet of the Federal Reserve System from 1914-1941 and 1942-1975 and analyzing developments in the Fed’s balance sheet. I wrote about them in previous posts. Now a third paper completes the data and the analysis by bringing the story up to the present. The author is Nicholas Fries and the paper is called “Insights from the Federal Reserve’s Weekly Balance Sheet, 1976-2017.”

The most recent paper is no. 114 (currently the latest paper) in this working paper series that Hanke edits. The earlier papers were nos. 70 and 104 in the series. The data files can be viewed from links under the paper.

The Fed has made digitized weekly data of its weekly balance sheet available since 1996, but not earlier, and from 1996-2002 the data were only previously available as individual files on the Fed’s Web site, not in a spreadsheet. From 2002 downloadable spreadsheet data are available. Besides appreciating the service Fries has done making the data available, readers will appreciate his balance sheet analysis, which is simple and to the point.

One more paper is left in the series on the Fed’s balance sheet. I will post about it within the next month.