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More exciting than it sounds: the Beige Book
Don’t let all the math fool you. At its heart, the economy is a social creation, driven by both our higher-order functions of risk and reward and the ancient part of our brain that causes flop sweat. So when you want to get a sense of how things are going, you should look at the numbers, but there can also be value in asking people about the view out their window. The Federal Reserve thinks so. For most, a chatty cabbie or a “How’s business?” over scotch rocks at the sky lounge might net some novel real-world economic insight, but the Fed takes the idea a bit further. Eight times a year, each of the 12 ... (full story)