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What does United States's macro picture look like? Sixteen figures drawn from the IMF WEO (April 2025), IMF Balance of Payments Statistics, and IMF IIP: real growth, inflation, fiscal balance, unemployment, and public debt first; then the external balance, current account, trade openness, real exchange rate, net international investment position, commodity terms of trade, international reserves, a projection-vs-realized backtest, a growth/inflation scatter, the real-vs-nominal GDP wedge, and a reserves-cover in months of imports. Values through 2024 are realized; WEO staff forecasts beyond 2024 are excluded. The set mirrors the indicators the IMF Article IV consultation assesses when evaluating macroeconomic performance.
Annual real GDP growth is the first-order summary of cyclical performance. Kose, Otrok & Whiteman (2008, 'Understanding the evolution of world business cycles,' Journal of International Economics) decompose country-level growth into a world factor, a regional factor, and country-specific shocks; the deep recessions of 2009 and 2020 were world-factor events, while most smaller fluctuations are country-specific.
CPI inflation at the period-average basis. The consensus target for inflation-targeting central banks is 2% (Bernanke, Laubach, Mishkin & Posen 1999, Inflation Targeting). Deviations above 5% for more than two years typically coincide with loss of exchange-rate anchor in emerging markets (Ha, Kose & Ohnsorge 2019, Inflation in Emerging and Developing Economies, World Bank).
General-government net lending (+) or borrowing (-) as a percent of GDP. Bohn (1998, 'The behavior of US public debt and deficits,' Quarterly Journal of Economics) formalised a sufficient fiscal-sustainability condition: the primary surplus must rise with debt. IMF Fiscal Monitor benchmarks a deficit of 3% of GDP as the common Article IV caution line for advanced economies.
The unemployment rate is WEO's labour-slack indicator. Blanchard & Katz (1997, 'What we know and do not know about the natural rate of unemployment,' Journal of Economic Perspectives) argue long-run shifts in the natural rate are driven by wage-setting institutions more than by cyclical demand. In emerging markets, measured unemployment often understates labour-market slack because of large informal sectors (ILO 2023, World Employment and Social Outlook).
Gross general-government debt as a percent of GDP. Reinhart & Rogoff (2010, 'Growth in a time of debt,' AER P&P) drew attention to the 90%-of-GDP threshold; the IMF DSA framework now treats sustainability as country- and interest-rate-specific rather than a single number, but the ratio remains the first-line metric (IMF 2022, Staff Guidance Note on the Sovereign Risk and Debt Sustainability Framework).
The current account sums the net flow of goods, services, primary income, and unilateral transfers. A persistent deficit means the country is spending more than it earns abroad and is accumulating net external liabilities. Obstfeld & Rogoff (1996, Foundations of International Macroeconomics) anchor the intertemporal-budget reading of this series; Blanchard & Milesi-Ferretti (2011, '(Why) should current account balances be reduced?') characterize when an imbalance is benign and when it is a risk.
Openness is the simplest structural measure of integration with the world economy: (exports + imports) divided by GDP. Wacziarg & Welch (2008, 'Trade liberalization and growth', World Bank Economic Review) revisit the Sachs-Warner openness-growth link and show the effect is cleanest when measured from trade shares after documented liberalization episodes.
The REER is the trade-weighted exchange rate deflated by the ratio of domestic to foreign prices. A rising index means the real cost of United States's goods in foreign markets is going up, a loss of price competitiveness. Chinn & Prasad (2003, 'Medium-term determinants of current accounts', Journal of International Economics) document the tight panel link from REER misalignment to the current-account balance.
The Net International Investment Position is the stock counterpart to the current account, the cumulated net claims of United States on the rest of the world (positive) or of the rest of the world on United States(negative). Lane & Milesi-Ferretti (2007, 'The external wealth of nations mark II', Journal of International Economics) built this dataset and showed that the NIIP-to-GDP ratio is a first-order predictor of external vulnerability.
A country's commodity terms of trade is the price index of the commodities it net-exports. The Prebisch-Singer hypothesis (Prebisch 1950; Singer 1950) argued the long-run trend is downward for primary-commodity exporters, tightening their external balance. Deaton (1999, 'Commodity prices and growth in Africa', JEP) and the IMF (Gruss & Kebhaj 2019, WP/19/21, which produced the series below) show that short-run ToT shocks are first-order drivers of output and the fiscal position in commodity-exposed economies.
Total reserve assets held by the monetary authorities, foreign-currency deposits, foreign-currency securities, SDRs, reserve position in the IMF, and monetary gold. Rodrik (2006, 'The social cost of foreign exchange reserves,' International Economic Journal) estimated the insurance value against sudden stops; Jeanne & Ranciere (2011, Economic Journal) derived the reserve-to-import cover rule of thumb (about 3 months of imports, scaled up for short-term external debt).
The IMF's World Economic Outlook is published twice a year; each vintage carries a realized history and staff projections five years out. Our Parquet file is the April 2025 vintage. We plot realized real-GDP growth through 2024alongside the current-vintage projection 2025-2030, and benchmark the WEO's own ex-ante skill against a ten-year trailing mean (the Atkeson & Ohanian 2001 'hard-to-beat' benchmark): for each target year 2015-2024, the naive forecast is the mean of the previous ten realized values. A formal multi-vintage WEO track record (Timmermann 2007, 'An evaluation of the World Economic Outlook forecasts,' IMF Staff Papers) requires the archive of vintages, which is not included in this Parquet snapshot.
Plotting three-year-centred moving averages of real GDP growth against CPI inflation strips out year-to-year noise and exposes the slow-moving Phillips-type relationship between activity and prices. The literature since Phillips (1958) has evolved toward a flatter, expectations-anchored curve in advanced economies (Del Negro, Giannoni & Schorfheide 2015, AEJ Macro; Hazell, Herreno, Nakamura & Steinsson 2022, QJE), while in many emerging markets the slope remains steep and shifts with exchange-rate pass-through. Each point below is one overlapping three-year window, coloured from old (faint) to recent (strong) so the trajectory through the plane is visible.
The GDP deflator is an economy-wide price index that, unlike the CPI, covers every good and service produced domestically (including investment, government, and net exports). Its annual change equals nominal GDP growth minus real GDP growth. Tracking the two series together separates the real-output cycle from the price cycle: a widening wedge signals reflation driven by domestic producer prices and factor costs, a narrowing wedge signals disinflation. Okun (1970,The Political Economy of Prosperity) and Nordhaus (1972,BPEA) formalised the split; modern fiscal-sustainability accounting (Blanchard 2019, AEA Presidential Address) turns on nominal growth exceeding the nominal interest rate, so nominal-growth visibility matters in its own right.
The simplest reserve-adequacy benchmark is the months-of-imports cover: reserves divided by average monthly merchandise imports. The Greenspan- Guidotti rule (Greenspan 1999; Guidotti 1999) anchors the conventional three-month minimum; the IMF's ARA framework (IMF 2011, 'Assessing Reserve Adequacy') refines this for short-term external debt and broad- money flight risk. For commodity-importing emerging markets the cover ratio is the most-watched single number going into a sudden-stop episode (Calvo, Izquierdo & Mejia 2008, 'Systemic Sudden Stops,' NBER WP 14026).
References. Atkeson, A. & Ohanian, L. E. (2001). 'Are Phillips Curves Useful for Forecasting Inflation?' Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis Quarterly Review 25(1): 2-11. Bohn, H. (1998). 'The Behavior of U.S. Public Debt and Deficits.' Quarterly Journal of Economics 113(3): 949-963. Timmermann, A. (2007). 'An Evaluation of the World Economic Outlook Forecasts.' IMF Staff Papers 54(1): 1-33. Catao, L. A. V. & Milesi-Ferretti, G. M. (2014). 'External Liabilities and Crises.' Journal of International Economics 94(1): 18-32. Chinn, M. D. & Prasad, E. S. (2003). 'Medium-term Determinants of Current Accounts in Industrial and Developing Countries: An Empirical Exploration.' Journal of International Economics 59(1): 47-76. Gruss, B. & Kebhaj, S. (2019). 'Commodity Terms of Trade: A New Database.' IMF Working Paper WP/19/21. Jeanne, O. & Ranciere, R. (2011). 'The Optimal Level of International Reserves for Emerging Market Countries: A New Formula and Some Applications.' Economic Journal 121(555): 905-930. Lane, P. R. & Milesi-Ferretti, G. M. (2007). 'The External Wealth of Nations Mark II.' Journal of International Economics 73(2): 223-250. Obstfeld, M. & Rogoff, K. (1996). Foundations of International Macroeconomics. MIT Press. Reinhart, C. M. & Rogoff, K. S. (2010). 'Growth in a Time of Debt.' American Economic Review Papers & Proceedings 100(2): 573-578.