Categories: OLD Media Moves

Stop the presses. The beige book is out

Dan Barkin, a senior editor at The (Raleigh) News & Observer and the paper’s former business editor, riffs on the release of the beige book on Wednesday and other economic indicators.

Barkin writes, “I was just looking at the CNBC app on my Blackberry (this tells you everything you need to know about me), and I noticed an alert that said the Beige Book for December had just come out.

“The Beige Book is produced by the Federal Reserve eight times a year, and is an anecdotal assessment of how the economy is doing in each of the Fed’s districts. We are in the Richmond district, along with a bunch of other southern and border states.

“The Beige Book is kind of what it would be like if you were with a bunch of Fed officials at a bar after work, and they were talking about what they’d heard from around the country: I talked to a car dealer in Kansas City, and he said business was picking up. This guy who runs a small real estate business in Atlanta says he’s had an uptick in showings. This guy who operates a rug factory in Alabama says orders are down.

“It’s about as close to a real-time look at the economy as you can get, and it’s better, in my view, than a lot of economic statistics that are often a little old and not always reliable. Although you’ll get an argument on that.”