GDP Growth (annualised)
1.5%
down 2.3 pts vs a year ago
How fast the whole economy grew last quarter.
Q2 2026 · FRED A191RL1Q225SBEA
Hustlin' / Markets / Economic Analysis
Company earnings, chart patterns and your own nerve all matter. But they all happen inside an economy, and the economy sets the water level for every one of them. This page is the whole US macro picture in the order a working analyst actually reads it — growth, then inflation, then rates, then jobs, then the household — with every figure pulled live from the Federal Reserve and dated to its own release.
Free, no account, no email. Nothing on this page is investment advice.
Since your last visit
Most of this page is true for weeks at a time. This block is the part that is not. It compares every figure below against the previous update and names both dates, so you never have to guess how fresh a number is.
Nothing on this page has been revised since 2026-08-02. That is normal — most of these series report monthly, and a page that claimed something new every day would be making it up.
Today's focus
Start with growth, not with the headline.
The number in the news is the one that moved, not the one that matters. Read the page in order and the headline lands in context instead of setting it.
The method
Almost everyone reads economic data backwards: they see a headline, react to it, and then hunt for context afterwards. That is how you end up convinced the economy is collapsing because of one jobs report, or that everything is fine because one inflation print came in soft. The fix is boring and it works — always read the same five blocks in the same sequence, so each number arrives already surrounded by the numbers that explain it.
Why the order matters A rate cut with rising unemployment and a rate cut with falling inflation are the same event pointing in opposite directions. The sequence is what tells them apart, and it is the spine of the whole Economics for Traders course — five stages that walk this exact path from first principles.
Block 1 — Growth
Growth is the base layer. Everything else on this page is a modifier on it. The catch is that the headline growth number — GDP — is slow, backward-looking and heavily revised, so the faster series next to it are doing most of the real work.
1.5%
down 2.3 pts vs a year ago
How fast the whole economy grew last quarter.
Q2 2026 · FRED A191RL1Q225SBEA
1.1%
up 0.6 pts vs a year ago
Physical output of factories, mines and utilities.
Jun 2026 · FRED INDPRO
6.7%
up 2.7 pts vs a year ago
What Americans actually spent. Consumption is about two thirds of the economy.
Jun 2026 · FRED RSAFS
76.1%
down 0.1 pts vs a year ago
How much of the country’s productive capacity is in use. Above ~80% tends to push prices up.
Jun 2026 · FRED TCU
1.43M
up 48.0 thousand vs a year ago
New homes broken ground on, annualised. Housing turns before the wider economy.
Jun 2026 · FRED HOUST
1.1%
down 1.3 pts vs a year ago
National house prices versus a year ago.
May 2026 · FRED CSUSHPINSA
GDP arrives quarterly and gets revised twice, so by the time it confirms something, markets priced it months ago. Treat it as scorekeeping, not signal. The series worth watching in real time are the monthly ones underneath it: industrial production tells you whether factories are busy, retail sales tell you whether consumers are still spending, and housing starts turn earlier than almost anything else in the economy because building a house is the single most rate-sensitive decision a business makes.
Capacity utilisation is the quiet one. When the country is using more than roughly 80% of its productive capacity, further demand tends to show up as higher prices rather than more output — which is the mechanism connecting this block directly to the next one. A strong growth number with utilisation running hot is a different animal from the same growth number with slack in the system.
Go deeper Stage 1 of Economics for Traders is the full version of this block — what GDP does and does not measure, why revisions run as large as they do, and which leading indicators earn their reputation. If you are not investing yet, start instead with the free Stage 4: Invest.
Block 2 — Inflation
Inflation is the difference between a raise and a real raise, between a return and a real return. There are several measures of it and they disagree, which is not a flaw — each one is answering a slightly different question.
3.5%
up 0.8 pts vs a year ago
How much more the same basket of goods costs than a year ago.
Jun 2026 · FRED CPIAUCSL
2.6%
down 0.3 pts vs a year ago
Inflation with the two most volatile categories stripped out. The Fed watches this one.
Jun 2026 · FRED CPILFESL
3.7%
up 1.1 pts vs a year ago
The Fed’s preferred inflation gauge — the 2% target is set against this, not CPI.
Jun 2026 · FRED PCEPI
3.3%
up 0.5 pts vs a year ago
Core PCE is the single number the Fed is actually targeting at 2%.
Jun 2026 · FRED PCEPILFE
5.5%
up 3.1 pts vs a year ago
What producers charge for finished goods and services. Often moves before consumer prices do.
Jun 2026 · FRED PPIFIS
2.28%
down 0.1 pts vs a year ago
Inflation the bond market is pricing in over ten years. A market forecast, not a measurement.
31 Jul 2026 · FRED T10YIE
2.30%
down 0.0 pts vs a year ago
Expected inflation for the five years starting five years out. The Fed watches it for anchoring.
31 Jul 2026 · FRED T5YIFR
CPI is what the news reports. Core PCE is what the Federal Reserve has an actual 2% target against. They differ in coverage and in weighting — PCE accounts for people switching to cheaper substitutes when prices rise, and includes spending made on households' behalf such as employer-paid health insurance. That usually leaves PCE running a few tenths below CPI. If you are trying to anticipate the Fed rather than react to a headline, core PCE is the series to watch.
The last two figures in this block are different in kind from the rest. Breakeven inflation and the five-year, five-year forward rate are not measurements of what prices did — they are what the bond market is currently pricing for what prices will do. That makes them a forecast, with all the humility that implies, but it is a forecast people are betting real money on. The Fed watches them closely for one specific reason: if long-run expectations drift, inflation becomes self-fulfilling as workers and firms start building it into wages and contracts. Expectations staying anchored while actual inflation runs hot is a very different situation from both moving together.
Producer prices sit upstream of all of it. What producers charge for finished goods often moves before what consumers pay, though the pass-through is inconsistent enough that it is a hint rather than a leading indicator you can time anything with. Note this is the final-demand measure, not the all-commodities one — the raw commodity basket swings violently enough that quoting it next to CPI would imply an inflation rate nobody is experiencing.
Go deeper Stage 2 of Economics for Traders covers where each index comes from, why shelter costs lag reality by roughly a year in CPI, and how to read an inflation report without being led by the headline. To see what inflation does to your own money over time, run it through Calculate Your Hustle.
Block 3 — Rates & bonds
Rates are the price of money and the discount rate underneath every asset on earth. A stock is a claim on future cash; the rate is what translates that future cash into a number today. When the 10-year moves, the arithmetic beneath every valuation moves with it.
| Rate | Now | Vs a year ago | As of |
|---|---|---|---|
| Fed Funds Rate | 3.63% | down 0.7 pts | Jun 2026 |
| 3-Month Treasury | 3.82% | down 0.6 pts | 30 Jul 2026 |
| 2-Year Treasury | 4.23% | up 0.3 pts | 30 Jul 2026 |
| 10-Year Treasury | 4.68% | up 0.3 pts | 30 Jul 2026 |
| 30-Year Treasury | 5.21% | up 0.3 pts | 30 Jul 2026 |
| 10-Year Real Yield (TIPS) | 2.41% | up 0.5 pts | 30 Jul 2026 |
| 30-Year Mortgage | 6.66% | down 0.1 pts | 30 Jul 2026 |
| 10-Year minus 2-Year | 0.47% | up 0.0 pts | 31 Jul 2026 |
| 10-Year minus 3-Month | 0.92% | up 1.0 pts | 31 Jul 2026 |
| High Yield Spread | 2.84% | down 0.1 pts | 30 Jul 2026 |
The Fed sets one rate — the overnight rate at the top of that table. Everything below it is the market's opinion about what the Fed will do next and how long it will hold. That is why the shape of the ladder carries more information than any single rate on it. When 3-month yields more than 10-year, the market is saying it expects cuts, which usually means it expects the economy to need them.
Two rows deserve individual attention. The 10-year real yield is the 10-year with expected inflation stripped out — what a lender genuinely earns after being compensated for price rises. It is the cleanest single read on whether money is actually tight, because a 6% nominal rate with 5% inflation is loose and a 3% nominal rate with 1% inflation is not. The high yield spread is the extra return lenders demand from risky companies, and credit markets have a long history of noticing trouble before equity markets do. It sits in this table rather than a credit section because it is a rate, and because when it moves quickly it is usually the most important number on this page.
The mortgage row is where all of this reaches an ordinary household. It tracks the 10-year rather than the Fed funds rate, which is why mortgage rates sometimes fall while the Fed is still raising — a fact that confuses people every single cycle.
Go deeper Stage 3 of Economics for Traders is entirely rates, central banks and bonds — how the Fed actually transmits policy, why bond prices move opposite to yields, and how to read the curve without treating it as a crystal ball.
The dashboard
These are the indicators with the longest documented track records for flagging economic trouble early. Each one also has a documented history of being wrong, and that half is printed next to it on purpose. An indicator you only know the successes of is worse than no indicator at all.
1 of 5 are in the grey zone — not flashing, not clean. This is the state they spend most of their time in.
Grey zone
0.47%
Long money yielding less than short money. Every US recession since 1969 was preceded by an inversion here.
Where it fails: It has also inverted without a recession following, and the lead time has run from six months to over two years. It is a warning light, not a countdown.
31 Jul 2026 · FRED T10Y2Y
Not flashing
0.92%
The version the New York Fed uses in its published recession-probability model.
Where it fails: Same limitation as the 2-year spread, and the two do not always invert at the same time.
31 Jul 2026 · FRED T10Y3M
Not flashing
4.2%
Unemployment rising off its own low has historically been one of the more reliable real-time recession markers.
Where it fails: This compares to a year ago, which is a rougher measure than the formal versions economists use. Treat it as direction, not a trigger.
1 Jun 2026 · FRED UNRATE
Not flashing
197K
Weekly first-time unemployment filings — the fastest labour-market read available, published every Thursday.
Where it fails: Extremely noisy week to week. Holidays, strikes and hurricanes all move it. Only the multi-week direction is worth anything.
25 Jul 2026 · FRED ICSA
Not flashing
2.84%
The extra yield lenders demand from risky companies. Credit markets usually notice trouble before stock markets do.
Where it fails: Spreads can stay tight right up until they are not. A calm reading is not an all-clear, it is an absence of evidence.
30 Jul 2026 · FRED BAMLH0A0HYM2
It is not a forecast, and it is emphatically not a trading trigger. Every one of these signals has fired without a recession following, and several have gone quiet during the months immediately preceding one. Their lead times range from a few months to more than two years — a range so wide that acting on the signal alone has historically cost people more than ignoring it. What the dashboard is genuinely useful for is calibration: knowing whether the current environment is unusual or ordinary, so that when you read a frightening headline you already know whether the underlying data agrees with it.
The honest version The single most useful thing you can do with a recession signal is decide, in advance and in writing, what you would change if it fired — and then notice that for most long-term investors the honest answer is "nothing." That decision is a psychology problem more than an economics one, which is why it lives in Trading Psychology rather than here.
Block 4 — Labour
The labour market is the transmission belt. Rates change what borrowing costs; the labour market is where that becomes a change in what households can actually do. It is also the half of the Fed's dual mandate that competes with the other half.
4.2%
up 0.1 pts vs a year ago
Share of people who want work and cannot find it.
Jun 2026 · FRED UNRATE
7.9%
up 0.2 pts vs a year ago
The wider measure — adds part-timers who want full-time work and people who gave up looking.
Jun 2026 · FRED U6RATE
+57K
506 thousand jobs added over the past year
Net new jobs last month. The headline number on the first Friday of each month.
Jun 2026 · FRED PAYEMS
197K
down 22.0 thousand vs a year ago
People filing for unemployment for the first time, weekly. The fastest labour signal there is.
25 Jul 2026 · FRED ICSA
7.59M
up 284 thousand vs a year ago
Unfilled positions employers are advertising. Falls before layoffs start.
May 2026 · FRED JTSJOL
61.5%
down 0.8 pts vs a year ago
Share of working-age adults working or looking. A falling rate can flatter unemployment.
Jun 2026 · FRED CIVPART
That sounds contrarian and it is not meant to be. The unemployment rate is a lagging indicator by construction — people are counted as unemployed only once they are already out of work and actively looking. By the time it moves meaningfully, the change it is describing happened months earlier. It is also flattered by people giving up: someone who stops looking leaves the labour force entirely and stops being counted, which is why the participation rate sits next to it.
The faster reads are further down. Initial claims are weekly, which makes them the closest thing to a real-time labour signal that exists — at the cost of being extremely noisy, so only the multi-week direction is worth anything. Job openings fall before layoffs start, because the first thing a nervous employer does is stop hiring, not start firing. And U-6 captures the people the headline rate misses: part-timers who want full-time hours and people who have stopped looking. The gap between U-3 and U-6 widening while the headline rate holds steady is one of the more informative things this block can show you.
Go deeper Stage 4 of Economics for Traders covers the full indicator set and the global picture around it. If the labour market is affecting you personally right now rather than theoretically, the free Financial Literacy course starts at exactly that point — all five stages, no account needed.
Block 5 — The household
This is where the previous four blocks land. Consumer spending is roughly two thirds of the US economy, so the state of the household balance sheet is not a footnote to the macro picture — it is most of it.
49.5
down 11.2 points vs a year ago
How households say they feel. Index, 1966 = 100. Sentiment and spending often disagree.
Jun 2026 · FRED UMCSENT
2.7%
down 1.9 pts vs a year ago
Share of after-tax income Americans are saving.
Jun 2026 · FRED PSAVERT
2.92%
down 0.1 pts vs a year ago
Share of card balances 30+ days late. Where financial stress shows up first.
Q1 2026 · FRED DRCCLACBS
3.4%
up 5.8 pts vs a year ago
Credit card debt outstanding versus a year ago.
May 2026 · FRED REVOLSL
120.7
up 1.1 points vs a year ago
The dollar against a trade-weighted basket. A strong dollar squeezes US exporters’ earnings.
24 Jul 2026 · FRED DTWEXBGS
5.5%
up 1.4 pts vs a year ago
How fast the money supply is growing. Shrank outright in 2023 for the first time since the 1930s.
Jun 2026 · FRED M2SL
Consumer sentiment and consumer spending disagree constantly, and when they do, spending wins. People have told surveys the economy was terrible while setting retail sales records in the same month. Sentiment is worth tracking because it occasionally leads a genuine pullback, but it is worth discounting heavily because it is also heavily influenced by whichever way petrol prices moved last week and by what people saw on the news.
The behavioural series carry more weight. Credit card delinquency is where financial stress becomes visible first, because a card payment is the bill people miss before they miss a rent or car payment. Revolving credit growth tells you whether spending is being funded by income or by borrowing — the same spending number means two completely different things depending on the answer. And the savings rate is the buffer: it is what determines whether a shock is an inconvenience or a crisis.
There is a personal reading of this block as well as an economic one. Every series here has a household-level equivalent that you control directly, and none of them require you to be right about the economy. Your own savings rate, your own revolving balance and your own buffer are the version of this data that actually changes your outcome.
The version you control The free Financial Literacy course are this block applied to one household — banking, debt and an emergency fund, in that order, with no account required. Or run your own numbers in Calculate Your Hustle.
Block 6 — Where it shows up
Macro data is abstract until you can see where it lands. Sectors are the bridge: different parts of the market carry different sensitivities to growth, rates and inflation, so the same economic reading is good news for one and bad for another.
| Sector | ETF | Today | Historically leads |
|---|---|---|---|
| Technology | XLK | -0.22% | Early expansion |
| Real Estate | XLRE | -0.51% | Mid cycle |
The "historically leads" column is the single most misusable thing on this page, so here is the caveat in full. Sector rotation is a real, documented long-run pattern — rate sensitivity, cyclicality and pricing power genuinely differ by sector, and those differences genuinely produce different average behaviour across a cycle. What it is not is a schedule. Sectors lead out of turn constantly, cycles do not announce which phase they are in until afterwards, and a single day's move tells you nothing whatsoever about any of it.
The legitimate use is diagnostic rather than predictive. If defensive sectors are leading for weeks while the headline index still rises, that is worth noticing, because it means the market's internals disagree with its surface. Whether that resolves upward or downward is not something this table can tell you.
Go deeper Stage 5 of Economics for Traders is sectors and strategy — which sectors carry which sensitivities and why, and how to translate a macro view into a position without over-committing to a forecast. For screening individual names inside a sector, the free Fundamental Analysis page has the screener and every metric explained.
Block 7 — Cross-asset
Every block above describes one economy. This is what that economy does to the different places you can put money. Growth, inflation and rates do not affect all assets the same way — they affect them in roughly opposite ways, which is the entire mechanical argument for owning more than one thing.
Stocks are the baseline. Toggle any asset class to overlay it, all normalised to percentage change so things trading at wildly different prices can be compared honestly.
Charts by TradingView, one year, normalised to percentage change. These are the most widely held fund for each asset class, not recommendations — they are used because they are liquid, cheap and what most people actually own. Bitcoin is priced on a spot exchange rather than an ETF so the history goes back further.
| Asset class | Proxy | What drives it | Where it disappoints |
|---|---|---|---|
| US stocks | SPY | Corporate earnings and the rate used to discount them. Rewards growth, punishes rising real rates. | Falls hardest exactly when you are most likely to need the money — recessions cost jobs and portfolios together. |
| Gold | GLD | Real interest rates above all. Gold pays no income, so it competes with cash — when real yields fall, holding it costs less. | Produces nothing. Long stretches of flat-to-negative real return, and it is not a reliable short-term inflation hedge. |
| Long Treasuries | TLT | Interest rates, inversely and with leverage. A long bond's price moves several percent for every one percent move in yield. | Failed as a stock hedge in 2022, when rising inflation hit both at once. The hedge works against growth shocks, not inflation shocks. |
| Real estate | VNQ | Rates and rents pulling opposite ways. Cheap borrowing lifts values; a strong economy lifts rents. | Behaves far more like equities than most people expect. It is not the diversifier the "different asset class" label implies. |
| Commodities | DBC | Physical supply and demand, and the only asset class that reliably rises with an inflation surprise. | Long-run real return near zero, high volatility, and futures roll costs quietly erode holdings. |
| International stocks | EFA | Foreign earnings plus the dollar. A falling dollar adds to returns for a US investor; a rising one subtracts. | Correlations with US stocks rise precisely during crises, which is when diversification was supposed to help. |
| Bitcoin | BTC | Liquidity and risk appetite far more than scarcity. It has traded as a high-beta risk asset, not as digital gold. | Roughly fifteen years of history including several drawdowns of 50–80%. Too short a record to make confident claims about. |
| Cash | BIL | The Fed funds rate, directly. The only line that cannot fall in nominal terms. | Loses purchasing power whenever inflation runs above the rate, which is most of history. |
Whichever line is highest over any given year is mostly a fact about that year. What the chart is genuinely useful for is watching how the lines move relative to each other as conditions change. When gold and long bonds rise together while stocks fall, the market is pricing lower growth and lower rates. When commodities rise while bonds fall, it is pricing inflation. When everything falls together — which happened in 2022 — it is pricing a rate shock, and that is the environment in which diversification helps least and surprises people most.
That last case is the one worth internalising. The standard argument for holding stocks and bonds together assumes they move in opposite directions, and that assumption held for most of the period the argument was built on. It failed in 2022 because the driver was inflation rather than a growth scare, and the same driver hits both. Diversification is real, and it is conditional on the type of shock — which is precisely why the blocks above this one matter.
Go deeper Stage 5 of Economics for Traders covers asset behaviour across regimes — which conditions favour which assets and why the relationships break. To see how the same forces show up inside the stock market rather than across asset classes, the sector table above and sector breadth are the equivalent view.
What is coming
Everything above is data that has already been published. This is what has not been yet. Scheduled releases matter more than their content often justifies, for one reason: markets trade expectations, not levels. A terrible number everybody already expected moves nothing; a mildly disappointing one that surprises can move a great deal.
Learn the reasoning
Everything on this page stays free and always will. What a course buys you is the part a dashboard cannot give you — knowing which of these numbers to weight, when a signal is worth acting on, and how the five blocks fit together into a view instead of a pile of figures.
$37.95
One-time. Lifetime access. Price includes tax — nothing is added at checkout.
$127.95
All four paid courses. One-time, lifetime access, tax included.
Not investing yet? Do not buy any of these. The free Financial Literacy course covers banking, debt and an emergency fund first, and none of the above matters until those are handled.
Common questions
Growth first, then inflation, then rates, then the labour market, then the household. Growth tells you how big the pie is. Inflation tells you what the slices are really worth. Rates are the Fed's response to the first two, and they set the price of everything else. The labour market is the part that changes households' actual behaviour, and the household block is where you find out whether people can absorb what the first four did to them. Reading in that order is what stops you over-weighting whichever number happened to be in the news that morning.
The curve is inverted when short-term Treasuries yield more than long-term ones — normally the reverse is true, because investors expect compensation for tying money up longer. Inversion has preceded every US recession since 1969, but the lead time has ranged from about six months to over two years, and it has also inverted without a recession following. It is a warning light, not a countdown.
CPI is the number in headlines; PCE is the number the Federal Reserve targets. They differ in what they cover and how they weight it — PCE accounts for people substituting cheaper goods when prices rise and includes spending made on households' behalf, such as employer-paid health insurance. PCE therefore usually runs a few tenths below CPI. The Fed's 2% target is set against core PCE specifically, so when you are trying to guess what the Fed will do, that is the series to watch.
No single one, but rates come closest, because a stock is a claim on future cash and the rate is what discounts that cash back to today. When the 10-year Treasury yield moves, the arithmetic underneath every valuation moves with it. That said, the market trades expectations, not levels — a bad number that was already priced in moves nothing, and a mildly disappointing one that surprises can move a lot. Watching levels without watching what was expected is the most common mistake.
Every economic figure on this page comes from FRED, the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, which republishes official Bureau of Labor Statistics, Bureau of Economic Analysis and Federal Reserve Board series. Each number links to its own FRED series page and shows its reference date. Sector quotes come from Finnhub. Nothing here is estimated, modelled or forecast by us.
The figures are written into the page each time the site is rebuilt, and every one carries the date of its own underlying release. Most of these series report monthly, some quarterly, a few daily — so a page that claimed something new every single day would be inventing it. The "what changed" block at the top compares this update against the previous one and names both dates, so you can always see exactly how fresh the numbers are.
Sources and method. Every economic series is pulled from FRED, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, which republishes official BLS, BEA and Federal Reserve Board data. Each figure links to its own series page so you can check it against the source and see the full history. Sector quotes come from Finnhub and are last close. Series are revised after first publication, sometimes substantially, which is why every number here carries its own reference date rather than a single page-level timestamp.
Data last written into this page on .
This is not investment advice. Hustlin' is educational and entertainment content. Nothing on this page is a recommendation to buy, sell or hold anything, and no indicator described here predicts the future. See our editorial standards for how figures are sourced and verified.