How the US Liquidity Data Is Built

Four series at their own frequency. The Treasury General Account closing balance for every business day since October 3, 2005. The amount accepted at the Federal Reserve's overnight reverse repo operation for every operation since September 23, 2013. Reserve balances with Federal Reserve Banks and the Fed's total assets for every Wednesday since December 18, 2002. And net liquidity, TFTC's calculation from the other three, for every Wednesday since 2013-09-25.

Daily series carry one row per business day and weekly series one row per Wednesday. The tracker never fills the days between Wednesdays with interpolated or repeated values, on the page, in the charts or in the files.

The Daily Treasury Statement has reported the Treasury's account at the Fed under three names, and the tracker chains them into one series. From October 2005 to September 30, 2021 it is the row named “Federal Reserve Account”, closing balance column. From October 1, 2021 to April 15, 2022 it is “Treasury General Account (TGA)”, closing balance column. From April 18, 2022 the statement reports four rows a day (opening balance, deposits, withdrawals, closing balance), and the figure is the row named “Treasury General Account (TGA) Closing Balance”, whose value Fiscal Data serves in its “today” column. Each day's closing balance equals the next day's opening balance across both changes, which is how the join was checked. The 3 reads are filtered to exactly these rows.

The series is the account at the Federal Reserve only. Before late 2008 the Treasury kept most of its cash in Tax and Loan accounts at commercial banks and only a few billion dollars at the Fed, and from 2008 to 2013 it also held a Supplementary Financing Program account; those are separate rows in the statement and are not included, because the figure that matters for reserves is the cash sitting at the Fed. Deposits and withdrawals are shown from April 18, 2022, when the statement began reporting them on this table.

The figure is the total accepted at the regular overnight reverse repo operation, the one that closes at 1:15 pm Eastern against Treasury collateral. The same feed carries term reverse repos (tests in 2014 and 2015, and two-day operations before holidays from 2017 to 2019) and small value exercises, tiny test operations the Desk runs about once a year in the morning, some against mortgage-backed collateral. Those are dropped: an operation counts only if its term is overnight, its collateral is Treasuries and its note does not describe it as a small value exercise. Where two overnight operations remain on one day, the one with the later close is the facility's operation.

The number of counterparties is the count whose propositions were accepted, and the award rate is the fixed rate paid. Both are blank for the earliest operations, where the feed does not report them.

Net liquidity is Fed total assets minus the Treasury General Account minus overnight reverse repo. It is TFTC's calculation, the formula the market's liquidity debate uses, and not a Federal Reserve series; every page that shows it says so.

It is computed only for Wednesdays. The TGA and the reverse repo are observed every business day but the Fed's balance sheet is a weekly Wednesday level, so Wednesday is the only day on which all three are genuinely observed, and the weekly series is the one in the tables and the files. When a Wednesday is a federal holiday there is no Treasury statement and no operation; the row then uses the last observation before it, never more than 5 days back, and is marked carried, with the date of each component shown. A Wednesday with no usable component is left out rather than filled. The series starts on 2013-09-25, the first Wednesday after the facility's first operation.

Between Wednesdays the hub and the net liquidity page also show a running estimate: the newest TGA and reverse repo against the Fed's assets carried forward from the last Wednesday. It is labelled as a TFTC estimate wherever it appears, kept in its own row or box, named with the date of each component, carried in latest.json under its own key and never written into the Wednesday series. The next H.4.1 replaces it.

The New York Fed posts the reverse repo result at 1:15 pm Eastern; the site checks at 1:25 pm on weekdays. The Treasury publishes each day's statement the next business day around 4:00 pm Eastern; the site checks at 4:15 and 4:45 pm on weekdays. The Fed releases the H.4.1 on Thursdays at 4:30 pm Eastern; the site checks at 5:00 and 5:30 pm on Thursdays. Each check compares validated latest observation dates and values, the IORB rate, effective date and update date, and the latest TGA driver categories and date with the served JSON. Changes refresh the hub, affected series pages, their current-year archives, both JSON files and the email card. Changed current-year archives are announced to IndexNow. A check that finds nothing new changes nothing. Archive caches are independent of the live snapshot. Older historical revisions are left to the daily safety refresh.

Each weekday morning at 13:00 UTC an automated check reads latest.json and alerts TFTC when the newest TGA is more than 6 days old, the newest reverse repo more than 5 days, or the newest Wednesday level more than 9 days, allowances that cover weekends and single holidays without a false alarm.

Every page and file states one update date, taken from the data. A TGA figure is stamped at 22:00 UTC on its statement day, a reverse repo figure at 19:00 UTC on its operation day and an H.4.1 figure at 22:00 UTC on its Wednesday. A series page carries its own series' newest stamp; the hub, the net liquidity page and both JSON files carry the newest of all three. The same value is each page's structured-data dateModified, its sitemap lastmod and the dateModified in the files, where updatedThrough gives the bare day. The statement and the H.4.1 are published after the day they describe, so those stamps precede their release by design: the version names the observation, not the moment the site picked it up.

Every figure is re-read from its source on each refresh, so a revision the Treasury, the New York Fed or the Fed publishes in older observations is picked up by the daily safety refresh. Changes to sources, selection rules or arithmetic are dated in the changelog below. If you find a figure that does not match the official release, tell us through the contact page with the series and the date.

The original Treasury and Board of Governors figures are government data. Reserve balances, week averages and total assets are retrieved from FRED, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, with the Board's Data Download Program as fallback. The Board's website policies apply to direct downloads; credit the Board of Governors as the original source. The FRED terms request that users “cite the data source and acknowledge that you obtained the data from FRED”. The New York Fed Terms of Usegrant a license “to use, copy, and distribute Content for your personal or business purposes”, subject to the terms and content-specific restrictions. These upstream terms continue to apply. TFTC and the upstream publishers do not imply endorsement of downstream uses. TFTC's compilation, the chained TGA series, the selection of the daily operation and the net liquidity series and estimate are free to reuse under CC BY 4.0. Credit:

Source: TFTC, US liquidity tracker (tftc.io/us-liquidity), data through <date>.

Every observation of every series is at /us-liquidity/data.json, and the newest observation of each series with the running estimate is at /us-liquidity/latest.json. Both are open to any origin and state the license, the attribution, the sources and the update fields above. Fed total assets is in both files as a component of net liquidity.