Corporate-guidance screen · 1970–2026

This screen turns the Federal Reserve's Beige Book — the qualitative survey of business conditions published eight times a year across the twelve Fed districts — into numbers you can track. It reads the words firms and contacts use and scores the direction they imply, then layers a few forecasts on top.

The tools

Each book is downloaded and split into district-by-topic pieces by a parser (BeautifulSoup). The wording is scored two ways: a fixed finance dictionary (Loughran–McDonald) for tone and uncertainty, and a hand-built "adjective ladder" for direction. The probability models are ordinary logistic regressions fit with statsmodels. A separate hard-data series — daily tax withholding from the U.S. Treasury — is filtered and overlaid on the labor read.

The scoring mechanism

The adjective ladder maps intensity words to fixed points on a −2 to +2 scale: robust/strong = +2, grew/moderate = +1, modest/slight = +0.5, flat = 0, soft/declined = −1, collapsed = −2. A passage's score is the average of whatever ladder words appear in it; a district's score is the average across its sections; a lens is the average across districts. So +1.6 means "language averaging between moderate and robust," not a percentage — it's a tone reading, never a growth rate. Because real prose mixes intensities, scores cluster well inside ±2; a clean +2 needs strong language in every district with no qualifiers, which is rare.

The scores are never revised: a book's number uses only that book, so it can't change when later books arrive — provided the scoring rule itself stays frozen. The rule is versioned (v1); any future change runs as a new version beside the old, never overwriting history.

The probability models

Two forecasts sit on top of the descriptive scores, each a logistic regression. Recession in the next 12 months is fit on the growth score, its change since the last book, the risk score, and the labor score — trained against the official NBER recession dates. Inflation above 2% in 12 months is anchored to the actual headline CPI rate (its 12-month change from the BLS, 4.2% at the latest reading) and then adjusted by the inflation tone, its change, the labor score, and the bottlenecks score — trained against whether CPI later exceeded 2%. Anchoring on the real starting level matters: 4% today implies very different odds than 2%, and the tone scores supply the increment on top of where the rate already sits.

These are genuine forecasts, a different kind of thing from the descriptive scores, and they carry real uncertainty. To avoid hindsight, any historical view of a probability is computed "as it would have read at the time" — each past point uses only the data and model coefficients available on that date.

How fresh it is

The data updates with each Beige Book release. Because the book is never revised, every reading is a true point-in-time vintage — the number you actually had in hand that day. Use Download CSV to export the full history.

What's real vs placeholder. Real: the four lens scores (growth, inflation, labor, risks), scored by the adjective ladder over the actual Beige Book text (1996–present); the inflation anchor (BLS CPI-U); and the NBER recession dates. Still placeholder: the withholding overlay, the district heat-grid for pre-2024 books (those are scored at national level), and the topic-attention feed — these are clearly labeled here and will be wired to real sources next. Use Download CSV to export the full history.