Background to Beige Book Nowcast by Tellusant
We provide a snapshot of current economic activity. It is easy to past data and future projections. We provide the here and now to bridge the gap.
The Fed’s Beige Book, Summary of Commentary on Current Economic Conditions, covers current economic activity for the 12 Federal Reserve Districts. It is published sesqui-monthly (every 1½ months). Tellusant converts it into a quantitative nowcast.
The Beige Book is useful for, among others, CEOs and management teams who want to quickly assess where the economy is at present.
We compute a composite score for each of the twelve districts based on a semantic analysis of the report, then sum the scores weighted by the GDP of each district.
We have published these nowcasts since June 2015 on LinkedIn. The new series published here starts in October 2025. The LinkedIn series can still be found there.
Ther analysis is now entirely performed by our Fedora AI agent (v1.1.4). It consists of five parts:
- ChatGPT = runtime environment
- YAML = analytical serialization
- Excel = model + parameters
- Mermaid v11 = workflow graphing
In the next cycle, we will implemenent a scheduler such as cron in GitHub Action to make the updating instant upon report release.