Here is a textual summary of the recent Beige Book (released 29th May). The overall sentiment is assessed as positive, though moderating slightly from the April release. There is very little to suggest a definite change of direction from the FOMC - though, as usual, the Beige Book needs to be considered as only one input into monetary decisions.
Let’s start with overall sentiment index based on the Bing lexicon, which dropped slightly but remains well above zero, higher than the average of the last two years though considerably lower than the long-term average level (shown in green).
The Bing dataset was first published in Minqing Hu and Bing Liu, “Mining and summarizing customer reviews.”, Proceedings of the ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery & Data Mining (KDD-2004), 2004.
Positive value terms continue to outweigh negative terms, according to Bing lexicon scoring.
Inflation concern shows some moderation, though remains above levels reflected in Beige Book of late 2023.
Discussion of employment shows very little change from the prior Beige Book.
IN other words, not much really changed as we all await the next shoe to drop. but very interesting analysis