Compare Economic Indicators

With 31 indicators on the dashboard, the side-by-side comparison covers 465 unique pairings. Every pair has its own page with current values, trends, change since prior release, frequency, and direct links to the underlying source. The comparison view is most useful for indicators that are economically related — for example, the federal funds rate against the 10-year Treasury yield, or CPI against the PCE price index — because the divergence between them often carries more information than either reading on its own.

Four comparisons come up most often in operating decisions. CPI vs PCE shows the gap between the headline price-change number that drives news cycles and the index the Fed actually targets. Federal funds rate vs 10-year Treasury yield is the cleanest read on the yield curve’s shape, which historically leads recessions by 6 to 24 months when inverted. Unemployment vs nonfarm payrolls cross-checks the household and establishment surveys (they sometimes disagree, and the disagreement matters). Real GDP vs nominal GDP isolates the inflation contribution to top-line growth. The featured pairs below cover these and a handful of other common comparisons.

Every reading on this page comes from the same official U.S. government and industry-standard sources used elsewhere on ExecBolt: the Federal Reserve’s FRED database, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the Bureau of Economic Analysis, the U.S. Treasury, the Federal Register, Freddie Mac, and the National Association of Realtors. Each individual indicator page links directly to its primary source for verification. No values are estimated, modeled, or interpolated.

Each row aligns one metric — current value, previous reading, change since prior release, trend direction, publication frequency, source agency, last update — across the two indicators. The most informative line is usually the trend row: when both indicators trend up together, they tend to confirm a coordinated cycle move; when they diverge, the divergence usually tells you something about the regime shift in progress. The methodology and editorial-context sections below the table explain what each indicator measures and what historically “normal” readings look like.

Different indicators measure different slices of the economy with different lags. Real GDP smooths over a quarter; the unemployment rate captures the prior month; Treasury yields move minute by minute. Two indicators that are conceptually related can diverge for legitimate reasons: methodology differences (CPI uses a fixed basket while PCE allows substitution), survey differences (the unemployment rate comes from the household survey while nonfarm payrolls come from the establishment survey), or genuine economic shifts that have not yet propagated through every measure. The comparison view makes those gaps visible so they can be reasoned about rather than ignored.

Each indicator updates on its own schedule — daily for Treasury yields and the dollar index, weekly for jobless claims and mortgage rates, monthly for the major BLS releases, quarterly for GDP. The full dataset on ExecBolt was last refreshed June 2026; the “Last updated” row on each comparison table shows the publication date for that specific series.