Donald Trump's tariffs and trade policy continue to reverberate around the world:
- The heads of Walmart and Target told Trump last week that because of tariffs, prices will go up and store shelves will be empty (https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/companies/walmart-target-ceos-privately-warned-trump-tariffs-may-cause-empty-shelves-soon/ar-AA1DubpD).
- A growing number of companies – including Delta Airlines and General Motors – are telling investors that they cannot provide financial forecasts, because there are too many unknowns (https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/economy/gm-pulls-forecast-due-to-tariffs-as-nervous-consumers-rush-to-buy/ar-AA1DRY3A).
- UPS announced yesterday that it would be laying off 20,000 workers, in part because of "economic uncertainty" (https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/news/ups-set-to-lay-off-20000-workers-as-it-reduces-business-with-amazon/ar-AA1DTJWq). And of course, markets are very jittery.
I highly recommend a Marketplace special report from last week, "Selling America," which looks at what is changing, and how individuals and businesses are responding: https://www.marketplace.org/episode/2025/04/20/special-coverage-from-marketplace-selling-america-pm
So, things are quite murky. But even (especially?) in such times, economists need to understand the economy and where it's going. One way to do this is via surveys, especially if the survey has been going on for a long time, making it possible to compare figures.
The Philadelphia Federal Reserve does exactly this, via its "Manufacturing Business Outlook Survey" (https://www.philadelphiafed.org/surveys-and-data/regional-economic-analysis/manufacturing-business-outlook-survey). The monthly survey has been conducted since May 1968, and asks manufacturing businesses in their region how things are going now, and what they think about the future. The most recent survey, which came out last week, indicates that many businesses are concerned about where things are going.
Among the metrics that the survey checks are:
- Current and future general activity
- Current and future new orders
- Current and future prices paid
- Current and future employment
For each of these (and other) measures, people are asked to indicate whether the metric is increasing, decreasing, or has no change. In the case of future values, they're asked whether they expect, six months from now, whether the metric will increase, decrease, or be unchanged. The percentage of respondents who answer "increasing" is then subtracted from the percentage saying "decreasing" for the "diffusion index."
This week, we'll look at the Philadelphia Fed survey, reproducing some of the numbers and charts in their April report (https://www.philadelphiafed.org/surveys-and-data/regional-economic-analysis/mbos-2025-04), and generally trying to understand the current state of affairs.
Data and five questions
You can download the data for the survey from the survey's data page at
https://www.philadelphiafed.org/surveys-and-data/mbos-historical-data
I downloaded the complete history file in CSV format from:
The data dictionary will be a crucial part of understanding what columns to retrieve and process; you can find it here:
https://www.philadelphiafed.org/-/media/FRBP/Assets/Surveys-And-Data/MBOS/Readme.txt
This week's learning goals include working with dates and times, plotting, and filtering.
Paid subscribers can download the data file and data dictionary at the end of this post.
I'll be back tomorrow with my extended solutions, as well as (for paid subscribers) downloadable notebooks and one-click solutions in Google Colab.
Meanwhile, here are my five questions:
- Read the CSV data into a Pandas data frame. Make the
DATEcolumn into the index, as adatetimevalue. - Reproduce the plot at https://www.philadelphiafed.org/surveys-and-data/regional-economic-analysis/mbos-2025-04, showing the diffusion index for current and future general activity, both seasonally adjusted. By how much did the current seasonally adjusted diffusion index for general activity drop since the last survey?