The full mosaic (Slide 2) • The U.S. economy is complex — millions of households, workers, firms, and institutions interacting daily to produce, trade, and consume billions of dollars of goods and services. • The true state of all of this economic activity exists, but we only observe fragments. Individual data points are like tiles in a mosaic: the challenge for policymakers is to assemble the pieces to understand both current economic conditions and where they might be headed. Choosing the tiles (Slide 3) • Tiles represent different data points. They come from a lot of different data sources. The job of policymakers ... (full story)