We use weights based on the American Community Survey to construct summary statistics for our public releases. The survey consists of a core monthly module on expectations about macroeconomic and household-level variables and an additional quarterly module that allows us to address special topics. Our core module contains questions about survey respondents’ expectations for inflation, wage growth, home prices, various commodities, household income and spending, taxes, government debt, credit access, and job search. So far, quarterly modules have included questions on housing and employment, work history, job search, retirement, financial literacy, consumption and savings behavior, student loans, and various field experiments. These quarterly modules are developed by Federal Reserve staff in collaboration with academic consultants and the Nielsen team. First, however, new questions are evaluated using cognitive interviews, and every new module is pilot-tested before being put into the field. The Bank began publishing the results of the Survey in January 2014, after having fielded the Survey since December 2012. We introduced it through a series of posts on our Liberty Street Economics blog; eventually, after a suitable embargo period, we plan to release to the public all the micro data from the Survey. Approach to and benefits of eliciting probabilistic beliefs As I mentioned earlier, an important innovation of our Survey is that, in addition to asking the respondent for a point forecast, it uses probabilistic questions to elicit a respondent’s density forecast.
As well as being a year that saw a considerable strengthening of fiscal and macroeconomic discipline in Europe, 2012 also saw significant progress towards a banking union. Why has a banking union suddenly become such an indispensable and urgent project? Simply because we are now certain that many of the problems we have experienced, could have been avoided with a banking union. A banking union is necessary for the smooth functioning of a monetary union for the following three reasons: •  It breaks the link between banks and sovereigns by bringing banking supervision and crisis management to the federal level. With the banking union, banks will be considered as euro area institutions over and above their nationality; it will ensure that credit conditions in the euro area will not depend on where you are but on who you are, which is what should be expected of an efficient financial market. •  It allows re-integration of the European banking system. A supra-national supervisor is in fact better placed to assess the risks of cross-border activities and therefore to protect and encourage such activities; it is not subject to national biases that can lead to the temptation of economic introversion. It is therefore more credible and strengthens stability and confidence in the area;  •  Moreover, it restores the full efficacy of monetary policy.