Beige Book in a tag cloud: Continued gloom

The Fed's Beige Book is a hefty document that several times a year pulls together reports on economic activity from each of the Federal Reserve's 12 districts. I took today's report, all 17,000 words, and dropped it into my favorite new toy, our tag cloud creation software. Tag cloud software looks at text, and then analyzes the frequency that words appear in it, and enlarges words proportionally to their frequency.

It's a favorite of mine because it can visually distill large amounts of text into a graphical display. It saves you, the busy reader, the trouble of reading all 17,000 words if you wish. (Not me, alas.)

There are quite a few doom and gloom words, as befit the economy.

Actually, if you read the document, it could have been worse. To their credit, the Beige book's writers used many different phrases: "continued to weaken," "continued to fall," "continued to be quite weak," "continued to soften," "continued to pull back," "continued to deteriorate," "continued to decline," "continued to slow," "continued to be slow," "continued to be quite slow, "continued to report a slowdown," "continued to cut," "continued to note decreases," "continued to report falling sales," "continued to report sluggish sales," "continued to be wary," "continued to pull back," "continued to report declines," "continued to be low," "continued to be of concern," "continued to report pressure," "continued to contract," "continued to drop," "continued to struggle," "continued to be more pronounced" and, my favorite, "continued to languish." All appear at least once (and more often, several times) in the document.

Behold, the beige cloud!