United States

The collapse of Silicon Valley Bank and uncertainty around other US regional banks sparked interest in the bonds held by financial institutions, especially by differentiating available-for-sale (AFS) and held-to-maturity (HTM) securities. 

The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), the US agency in charge of insuring bank deposits, publishes several quarterly datasets tracking the health of its members. We have added their series detailing unrealised profits and losses on investment securities from FDIC-insured institutions. 

We visualise this series in the chart below, along with the U.S. policy rate. Interest-rate increases coincided with securities losses, as one would expect. Unrealised losses resulting from the current hiking cycle totaled more than USD 600 billion at the end of 2022. Securities classified as held-to-maturity accounted for half of that sum. Given they must stay on a financial institution’s books, they are a potential source of weakness for these institutions if there are liquidity issues.   

Uganda

We’ve added a range of monthly business confidence indicators from Uganda’s central bank, covering the economy as a whole and specific sectors. All series are expressed with a reference value of 50: an indicator below 50 means that businesses are more pessimistic than optimistic on a given topic, and vice-versa when above 50. 

At first glance, our dashboard appears to indicate that the Ugandan economy is doing well. Most indicators were well above 50 in recent months. However, it’s notable that businesses perceived significant issues with their access to credit and financial situation, likely a result of the global hiking cycle. Confidence in the wholesale trade sector has also slipped since June 2022, as have perceptions of current business conditions. But expectations 3 months forward remain optimistic.  

United Kingdom 

We’ve expanded our coverage of the labour market by figures on “employees under payroll,” broken down by industry and region. The geographic breakdown goes to the NUTS3 level, the Eurostat abbreviation for the smallest statistical regions.

In the chart below, we calculate an aggregated median and percentiles for the 179 NUTS3 regions, showing the percentage change in payrolls compared to a January 2020 baseline. The UK-wide total is also graphed as a comparison. 

It took 18 months (from January 2020 until September 2021) before half of the 179 regions had regained their pandemic losses. Today, almost all regions are above their pre-pandemic levels. Swindon is the only NUTS3 region where fewer employees are on payroll than there were in January 2020. 

Chile

We’ve added a new high-frequency indicator calculated by the central bank: the DRSI (Daily Retail Sales Index). It’s constructed using tax authorities’ records of electronic receipts covering all transactions – no matter the payment method – between companies and final consumers. A sample of companies is selected to build the indicator, which is updated twice a month. 

In the chart below, we used the DRSI to forecast the monthly retail trade series for Chile. Retail trade has been declining since May 2022, and the latest index reading shows that this trend is likely to continue.