Catherwood LibraryILR School

On Monday, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York unveiled a new tool to better gauge the labor market?s health through 8 factors (http://www.newyorkfed.org/labor-conditions/). The tool offers charts and the most recent statistics on unemployment, employment, hours, labor demand, labor force participation, job loss, wages, and labor market mismatches. The Federal Reserve has stated that it uses more than just the unemployment rate to measure the health of the labor market and the New York branch hopes that their new visualization will provide a more ?complete snapshot? for the public. The creation of the tool stems largely from the Fed?s commitment in December of 2012 to change interest rates should the nation?s unemployment rate fell below 6.5%, which has since been revoked due to issues in describing the health of the economy based on one measure.