Economic indicators for small-business loan, hiring, and pricing decisions. Follow interest rates, wages, supplier costs, inflation, and money supply alongside your own business numbers.
Combining money supply, producer costs, fuel, financing, labor, and consumer prices.
Waiting for the published snapshot.
M2 tracks money held in cash, deposits, and retail money market funds. Here’s this year’s pace.
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Year-to-date growth × 12 ÷ reported months
The previous December is the beginning-of-year baseline.
A continuation of the observed pace, not a forecast of consumer inflation. Read the assumptions.
Published observations, useful context, and what to watch next.
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Use national economic data alongside your own costs, demand, and cash flow.
Start with the payment your business can support, then use interest-rate trends as context. Compare the lender’s quoted rate, fees, repayment schedule, and total borrowing cost with cash available after operating expenses and existing debt payments.
Watch interest rates and the operating-cost indicators. A falling federal funds rate does not guarantee a lower business-loan offer, and the pressure score does not measure creditworthiness.
Prepare a base cash-flow forecast and a slower-sales scenario. Include the new payment in both, and review the assumptions with your lender or accountant.
Explore business funding readinessCompare the full added employment cost with the work and revenue the role can realistically support. Include wages, employer costs, benefits, recruiting, training, and the time before a new hire reaches normal productivity.
Use the labor-cost indicator to understand national wage trends, then check local pay for the actual role. Consumer prices and sentiment add demand context; your bookings, backlog, and cash flow show what your business can sustain.
Estimate the monthly cost of the role and the additional contribution after variable costs it could create. Test whether you can carry that cost during a slower month.
Connect staffing and business operationsReview pricing when your own labor, supplier, delivery, or financing costs change enough to affect margins. Use PPI, fuel, wages, and CPI to understand the wider environment, then calculate costs for the product or service you actually sell.
Producer prices, fuel, and labor help explain cost movement. CPI and sentiment provide customer-demand context. M2 is a separate money-supply signal, not a percentage to add automatically to your prices.
Compare contribution per sale before and after a proposed change. For a single product, break-even units equal fixed costs divided by selling price minus variable cost per unit, provided the contribution per unit is positive.
Discuss a cost and margin dashboardThis is general business-planning information. The model does not assess a particular loan, employee, or price change. Review commitments using your business records and qualified advice where needed.
Interest rates provide borrowing-cost context, while labor, producer prices, and fuel show pressures on operating cash flow. Compare those signals with actual lender terms, existing debt payments, and your own cash-flow forecast. This dashboard does not determine loan eligibility.
Use wage trends to inform the cost assumptions in a hiring budget, then compare them with local compensation, expected workload, and available cash. National labor data cannot tell you whether one specific role will pay for itself.
Rising input costs can reduce contribution per sale if your selling price stays fixed. Review actual invoices, payroll, and delivery costs before testing a price change. Customer demand and competitors also matter; an inflation reading is not an automatic price-increase rule.
No. M2 measures money supply, while CPI measures consumer prices. RE IMAGE extends current-year M2 growth at a linear pace and includes it at 25% of the pressure model. That projection is neither a CPI forecast nor a recommended price increase.
The dashboard is published by Hartford-based RE IMAGE for small-business owners in Connecticut and across the United States. Its economic series are national. Use local conditions and your own business figures alongside them.
The data pipeline checks FRED and BLS every 12 hours. Observation dates vary by series and are displayed separately from the refresh time. Missing required inputs make the pressure score unavailable, and a notice appears after 48 hours without a refresh.
Latest published snapshot: . Observation dates show when each measurement applies.
| Indicator | Level | Units | Annual change | Observed |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Money supply (M2) | 23,342.8 | Billions of dollars | 5.66 % | |
| Consumer prices | 334.13 | Index | 3.35 % | |
| Producer services costs | 157.41 | Index | 5.41 % | |
| Energy & fuel | 96.16 | Dollars per barrel | 49.62 % | |
| Interest rates | 3.75 | Percent | -0.47 percentage points | |
| Labor costs | 37.81 | Dollars per hour | 3.02 % | |
| Consumer sentiment | 51.7 | Index | -6.5 index points |
M2 year-to-date growth: 4.42%. Linear annual projection: 6.63%. Projection year: 2026. Model methodology · Download the JSON snapshot.
A transparent RE IMAGE model. Every weight and assumption is visible.
Each input is divided by its ceiling, converted to a 0–100 reading, and multiplied by its weight. Negative growth contributes zero; readings are capped at 100. The final sum is rounded once.
| Signal | Weight | Ceiling | Points |
|---|
Interest rates retain the source model’s absolute 12-month change: both increases and decreases contribute to this component. Consumer sentiment is context only.
We compare the latest monthly M2 level with the previous December, then extend that year-to-date pace across 12 months. For example, 5% growth through September is 5% × 12 ÷ 9 = 6.67%.
The 15% M2 ceiling and 25% weight are RE IMAGE model choices, not official economic thresholds. A new year’s projection starts only after that year’s first observation is published.
M2 measures money supply. CPI measures consumer prices. They describe different parts of the economy; a projected M2 growth rate is not a CPI estimate. Both contribute separately to this model.
This separate directional model retains the Faraj dashboard’s weights: fuel 30%, PPI 25%, labor 20%, rates 15%, and CPI 10%. It maps each annual change to a −100 to +100 range and labels the weighted result rising (≥15), cooling (≤−15), or stable.
Normalization ranges: fuel −20% to 20%; PPI 0.5% to 5.5%; labor 1.5% to 5%; rates −1 to 2 percentage points; CPI 1.5% to 4.5%. It describes the balance of annual changes, not a change in the composite score over time.
Data is checked every 12 hours from FRED and the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Each card shows its observation date; monthly releases naturally lag today. Oil compares the latest observation with the same date last year, using the preceding available day within seven days for weekends and holidays.
A failed refresh retains the last valid publication. After 48 hours without a refresh, this page shows a notice. Missing required inputs make the score unavailable rather than treating missing data as zero.
Connect your costs, operations, and customer experience with a system built around you.