Chicago Fed National Activity Index (CFNAI)
The Chicago Fed National Activity Index (CFNAI) is a monthly index designed to gauge overall economic activity and related 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 Release
Economic Activity Increased Sharply in January
The Chicago Fed National Activity Index was +0.02 in January, up from –0.58 in December.
The Chicago Fed National Activity Index webpages have undergone several changes this month. For the first time, we are providing the complete history of the CFNAI as it was released for each month since March 2001. You can find this history along with an updated background information document detailing its construction by following the links under Related Topics at right.
In addition, to mark the ten-year anniversary of the index in March, there is an accompanying Chicago Fed Letter detailing the performance of the CFNAI as a useful "real-time" indicator of economic activity and related inflationary pressure over the past decade.
More about 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.
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.
