The clever folks at the Federal Reserve of St.Louis have built upon their excellent newsletter to librarians and have now created an information portal for librarians and students. This is a good place to start in researching the U.S. economy and includes links to resources, their newletter, indicators, articles, and data. This is an extremely well-organized site. Also, check out their newly created financial crisis guide.

Liber8

Financial Crisis Timeline

Their latest newsletter is entitled "What is a Recession."

Posted by Louise Feldmann at 09:59 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I've created a new resource guide that pulls together souces of information on the recent U.S. financial crisis. The guide contains background information and news feeds.

Check in out at:
http://libguides.colostate.edu/financialcrisis

If you come across something that you think should be included, be sure to let me know.

-Louise

Posted by Louise Feldmann at 01:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The St. Louis Fed has recently announced their new Center for Economic Digitization.
http://stlouisfed.org/news/releases/2008/07_03_08a.html."To date, CEDD has digitized more than 300,000 pages of published material and archival collections from the Federal Reserve System and selected partners—currently, the Brookings Institution, the Government Printing Office and the Missouri Historical Society. This storehouse of documents includes U.S. government publications, Federal Reserve publications, photographs, manuscripts, and multimedia formats." All documents are available for public use and are available on the St. Louis Fed's FRASER (Federal Reserve Archival System for Economic Research) website at http://fraser.stlouisfed.org.

Also...the St. Louis Fed has published their May Liber8 newsletter titled "The Economics of War." It is available at http://liber8.stlouisfed.org/newsletter/. This provides a good overview of the issues and difficulties involved in determining the costs of war, including opportunity costs. The article provides a list of resources for further research. While geared for librarians these brief newletter articles always provide a good for an overview of a topic and are useful to researchers and students as well.

Posted by Louise Feldmann at 12:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The IMF's World Economic Outlook Database is a free resource that contains selected macroeconomic data series. Data is available from 1980 to the present and includes national accounts, inflation, unemployment rates, balance of payments, fiscal indicators, trade for countries and country groups (aggregates), and commodity prices. While this information is available elsewhere, this database is very easy to use and information is well organized. Tables are in tab deliminated format and easily downloadable to Excel.

http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/weo/2008/01/weodata/index.aspx

Posted by Louise Feldmann at 04:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The World Economic Forum's annual meeting was held last week in Davos, Switzerland. I happened to catch a C-Span replay of a session with Bono, Al Gore, and Thomas L. Friedman entitled " A Unified Earth Theory: Combining Solutions to Extreme Poverty and the Climate Crisis." Heavy stuff for a Saturday morning when my intent was to find some mindless programming, but this was incredibly interesting. Gore approached Bono several months ago about combining Bono's efforts towards poverty (One campaign) and Gore's concerns on global warming. They discussed this and how the two efforts are intertwined. You can view this and other sessions from the forum's annual meeting at:

Annual Meeting 2008 Webcasts, Podcasts, and Vodcasts
http://gaia.world-television.com/wef/worldeconomicforum_annualmeeting2008/

The World Economic Forum website can be found at:
http://www.weforum.org/en/index.htm

One
http://action.one.org/declare/index.html?gclid=CJn85-rnnpECFRE_OAodiyeCQQ

Al Gore's website
http://www.algore.com/

Posted by Louise Feldmann at 01:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The October 2007 issue of Liber8 has just come out. It covers the topic of declining or low personal savings rates and its effect on the U.S. economy; providing a good quick overview of the topic along with links to additional reading. The Liber8 newsletter is produced by the Research Library of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis.

http://liber8.stlouisfed.org/newsletter/2007/200710.pdf

Posted by Louise Feldmann at 04:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Yesterday, September 27th, The Denver Post's Business section had a report on the new metropolitan area GDP report released earlier this week by the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis. The Denver Post has a site that provides this information for metro areas around the country. Also included in this information is the percent change in GDP by industry sector from 2001 to 2005.

Real GDP by Metropolitan Area, 2001-2005
http://www.denverpost.com/gdp

Also worthwhile - explore the Bureau of Economic Analysis' website where you can find international, national, regional, and industry sector economic information.
http://www.bea.gov/

Posted by Louise Feldmann at 12:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Liber8 is a new economic newsletter from the St. Louis Federal Reserve Bank. Their first issue covers Suprime Mortgage Lending and provides a brief overview of the topic as well as links to articles with further information and free web resources. The newsletter is geared towards librarians and students and will be published 9 times a year and cover current economic topics. You can subscribe via RSS or asked to be added to their mailing list.

Liber8
http://liber8.stlouisfed.org/newsletter/newsletterarchives.html

Posted by Louise Feldmann at 11:47 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)