The New York Fed’s Open Market Trading Desk (“the Desk”) is responsible for aggregating and analyzing information on financial markets and investor expectations, among its many duties. This information is central to our ability to deeply understand and explain financial market developments to policymakers. We gather market intelligence in several ways, including by speaking regularly with market participants, analyzing financial market instruments, and administering surveys.
Today, we are making part of our intelligence more readily usable by releasing data from the Desk’s Survey of Primary Dealers and Survey of Market Participants in a machine-readable format through Excel, that also includes a combined dataset.
In this article, we provide context about what these surveys cover, how we use their results to help inform the monetary policy process, and what this newly available format includes.
What Our Policy Expectations Surveys Entail
The Desk started conducting policy expectations surveys with primary dealers in 2002, began publishing aggregated survey results in PDF format in 2011, and began conducting the Survey of Market Participants in 2014.
Currently, the surveys are conducted about one week before each regularly scheduled Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) meeting. They provide a timely and comprehensive summary of market expectations on topics relevant to the Committee’s mandate, including expectations for economic indicators and monetary policy.
They have several distinguishing features:
- They include questions about the expectations that respondents have regarding certain market developments. They also include so-called “probabilistic questions” that allow respondents to convey how likely they believe various outcomes are for key economic indicators, such as GDP growth and inflation, and policy expectations, such as the target range for the federal funds rate.
- Respondents are professional forecasters or investment professionals, providing a rich range of perspectives on expectations for the economy and for interest rate and balance sheet policy.
- The surveys often include questions that cover balance sheet policy expectations in more detail than comparable surveys about the U.S. economy.
How Survey Results Are Used
Survey results help us assess market expectations for the economy and monetary policy. They are routinely referenced in the System Open Market Account Manager’s briefing to the FOMC on financial market developments. We analyze the results in great detail and compare survey insights with information from different sources, including from financial market pricing data and other methods of gathering market intelligence.
Since 2011, we have made aggregated summaries of the survey results available on the New York Fed’s public website in PDF format about three weeks after each FOMC meeting. Starting with the July 2023 surveys and going forward—in addition to the PDF versions—we are also releasing the results in a machine-readable format—an Excel file for each survey cycle—to increase transparency and usability of the data (accessible both here and here). In addition, for the first time, we are including a version of the aggregated data which merges results from both surveys into one “combined” dataset.
We hope that the new format will enable broader use of this aggregated data, and we will continue to look for ways to make our work as accessible as possible.
Roberto Perli is the Manager of the System Open Market Account (SOMA) and a senior leader in the New York Fed’s Markets Group.
Julie Remache is the Deputy Manager of the System Open Market Account and a senior leader in the New York Fed’s Markets Group.
Alex Zhou Thorp is an associate director in the New York Fed’s Markets Group.
Olivia Lima is a principal in the New York Fed’s Markets Group.
Bryce Loomis is an analyst in the New York Fed’s Markets Group.
The views expressed in this article are those of the contributing authors and do not necessarily reflect the position of the New York Fed or the Federal Reserve System.