Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System

Financial Accounts of the United States

The quarterly Statistical Release Z.1, "Financial Accounts of the United States," or Financial Accounts, is published about 10 weeks following the end of each calendar quarter and is organized into the following sections:

• Matrices summarizing transactions and levels across sectors and tables on debt growth, net national wealth, gross domestic product (GDP), national income, saving, and so on
• Transactions of financial assets and liabilities, by sector and by financial instrument
• Levels of financial assets and liabilities, by sector and by financial instrument
• Balance sheets, including nonfinancial assets, and changes in net worth for households and nonprofit organizations, nonfinancial corporate businesses, and nonfinancial noncorporate businesses
• Supplementary balance sheet tables for the household sector, nonprofit organization sector, and the household and nonprofit organization sector with additional equity detail
• Integrated Macroeconomic Accounts (IMA)

The IMA relate production, income, saving, and capital formation from the Bureau of Economic Analysis's (BEA) national income and product accounts (NIPA) to changes in net worth from the Financial Accounts on a sector-by-sector basis. The IMA are published jointly by the Federal Reserve Board and the BEA and are based on international guidelines and terminology as defined in the System of National Accounts (SNA2008).

Federal Reserve Board staff have taken many steps over the past several years to conform the Financial Accounts with the SNA2008 guidelines. Nonetheless, a few important differences remain, in particular, the following in the Financial Accounts:

• The purchase of consumer durables is treated as investment rather than as consumption.
• Nonfinancial noncorporate businesses (which are often small businesses) are shown in a separate sector rather than being included in the household sector.
• Some debt securities are recorded at book value rather than market value.

Concepts of Levels and Transactions in the SNA and the Financial Accounts

The level of an asset or liability (also referred to as the "stock" or "outstanding") measures the value of the asset or liability in existence at a point in time. In the Financial Accounts, the levels are reported as of the end of each calendar quarter. In the SNA2008, the change in the level from one period to the next is called the economic flow, and can be decomposed into three broad elements: transactions, which measure the exchange of assets; revaluations, which measure holding gains and losses; and other changes in volume, which measure discontinuities or breaks in time series due to disaster losses or a change in source data or definition. In practice, other volume changes are relatively rare, and revaluations occur only for series carried at market value (such as corporate equities and mutual fund shares), so for many series the change in the level is equal to transactions.

Growth Rates

Growth rates calculated from levels include revaluations and other changes in volume. In order to isolate the effect of transactions on growth of a given asset or liability, users should calculate the ratio of transactions in a given period to the level in the preceding period.

Growth rates in table D.1 are calculated by dividing transactions at a seasonally adjusted annual rate from table D.2 by seasonally adjusted levels at the end of the previous period from table D.3. Growth rates calculated from changes in unadjusted levels may differ from those in table D.1.

Seasonal Adjustment

Seasonal factors are recalculated and updated with the December release of third-quarter data. Series that exhibit significant seasonal patterns are adjusted. Seasonal factors are generated using the X-13-ARIMA seasonal adjustment program from the U.S. Census Bureau, estimated using the most recent 10 years of transaction data. Due to distortions of seasonal patterns caused by financial crises, seasonal factors for affected series are extrapolated using pre-crisis data until several years of post-crisis data are available. Seasonally adjusted levels shown in table D.3 are derived by carrying forward year-end levels by seasonally adjusted transactions.

Data Revisions

Data shown for the most recent quarters are based on preliminary and potentially incomplete information. A summary list of the most recent data available for each sector is provided in a table following these notes. Nonetheless, when source data are revised or estimation methods are improved, all data are subject to revision. There is no specific revision schedule; rather, data are revised on an ongoing basis. In each release of the Financial Accounts, major revisions are highlighted at the beginning of the publication.

Discrepancies

The data in the Financial Accounts come from a large variety of sources and are subject to limitations and uncertainty due to measurement errors, missing information, and incompatibilities among data sources. The size of this uncertainty cannot be quantified, but its existence is acknowledged by the inclusion of "statistical discrepancies" for various sectors and financial instruments.

The discrepancy for a given sector is defined as the difference between the aggregate value of the sector's sources of funds and the value of its uses of funds. Sources of funds are gross savings less net capital transfers paid and net increase in liabilities; uses of funds are capital expenditures and the net acquisition of financial assets. If a sector's sources of funds are greater than its uses of funds, the sector is a net lender of funds in the accounts. In the reverse case, the sector would be a net borrower of funds. Most of the data for deriving gross savings come from the BEA's NIPA. For a financial instrument category, the discrepancy is defined as the difference between the measurement of funds raised through the financial instrument and funds disbursed through that instrument. The relative size of the statistical discrepancy is one indication of the quality of the underlying source data. Note that differences in seasonal adjustment procedures sometimes result in quarterly discrepancies that partially or completely offset each other in the annual data.

Financial Accounts Guide

Substantially more detail on the construction of the Financial Accounts is available in the Financial Accounts Guide, which provides interactive, online documentation for each data series. The tools and descriptions in the guide are designed to help users understand the structure and content of the Financial Accounts.

Each input and calculated series in the Z.1 is identified according to a unique string of patterned numbers and letters. The series structure page of the guide provides a breakdown of what the letters and numbers represent in the series mnemonics. Some data submissions to international organizations are also available in the guide. The guide is updated with the quarterly release and is available online:

www.federalreserve.gov/apps/fof

Enhanced Financial Accounts and Data Visualization

Additional supplementary information is available online in the Enhanced Financial Accounts, which augment the Financial Accounts with finer detail, additional types of activities, higher-frequency data, and more-disaggregated data. Links to the Enhanced Financial Accounts are available from both the Financial Accounts Guide page and the main release page. In addition, interactive online data visualizations are available for selected components of the Financial Accounts and Enhanced Financial Accounts. Links are available also on the same pages.

Publication webpage

The publication and instructions for downloading the data are available at: www.federalreserve.gov/releases/Z1.