Reuters Money

Now that Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke’s historic press conference can be viewed on the home page of the Fed’s website, I decided to watch it again to see what the conflicting opinions were about.

After again finding it interesting and informative, even if it produced no significant news, I toured this rich website and happened to notice, under the News & Events tab, a statement on financial literacy which Bernanke had submitted at a Senate hearing last month.

“The recent crisis demonstrated the critical importance of financial literacy and good financial decision-making, both for the economic welfare of households and for the soundness and stability of the system as a whole,” he had told a Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs subcommittee.

“Good financial choices depend on reliable and useful information, presented in an understandable way.”

To illustrate how the Fed has been helping “informed, educated consumers (to) achieve better outcomes” for themselves, he had mentioned quite a few topics — such as how to apply for a mortgage, how to budget, how to manage a checking account, and how to avoid scams — on which it provides information, much of it under the website’s Consumer Information tab.

Useful as such documents may be, are they all that you need — and could get online from the Fed — to achieve financial literacy and good financial decision-making?

Reading Bernanke’s statement after again hearing him explain to reporters how the Fed made its “financial choices” during the 2007-2008 financial crisis and since, I thought the Fed could do more to help informed, educated consumers in another way.

How? By enabling you to stay up-to-date on key economic data that influence the Fed in formulating monetary policy to promote its goals of maximum employment, stable prices, and moderate long-term interest rates.

Couldn’t such data help you, too, as you try both to learn and to maintain an even keel while having to navigate through the torrent of negative comments about the broad economy — whether from biased or ill-informed politicians, TV personalities, radio and TV commercials, or others — nearly two years after the current economic expansion began in June 2009?

Wouldn’t you be more comfortable making major spending or investment decisions if you could occasionally click a tab on the Fed’s website and be able to find in one place a handful of data — with helpful descriptions — that give you a grasp of how the economy is then performing and how its performance appears in a long-run perspective?

The Fed already provides such data on its website under the Monetary Policy and Statistical Releases & Historical Data tabs, including summarized economic projections by Bernanke and the other members of the Fed’s Federal Open Market Committee.

It should be able to repackage these — along with a few from the Commerce and Labor Departments, for consumers — in an understandable way.

The latest summary of FOMC members’ projections, released after their April meeting (instead of being held until the May 18 release of the meeting’s minutes), give you an idea of whether such information, provided in a user-friendly manner, would interest you as consumer and your own money manager:

Real Gross Domestic Product. Aware that the economy had been growing more slowly than expected, committee members trimmed the range of their projections for 2011’s increase in real (or inflation-adjusted) GDP from January’s projections of 3.2 to 4.2 percent to 2.9 to 3.7 percent. That would at least match 2010’s growth. Similar or slightly greater increases in total output of goods and services are projected for 2012 and 2013.

The day after the FOMC meeting, Commerce calculated that the first quarter’s real GDP had increased at a seasonally adjusted annual rate of only 1.8 percent over the fourth quarter of 2010. That was down from the fourth quarter’s 3.1 percent increase over the third.

Unemployment rate. Members shaved the low end of the range of their projections for 2011 from 8.4 to 8.1 percent after Labor found 13.5 million people — 8.8 percent of the total civilian labor force of 153.4 million — to have been unemployed in March. That unemployment rate was little changed from February but down 1.0 percent from November. Further rate reductions are expected for 2012 and 2013.

Inflation. The range of FOMC members’ projections of U.S. inflation for 2011, as measured by Commerce’s price index for personal consumption expenditures (PCE), was significantly increased from January’s 1.0-2.0 percent to 2.0-3.6 percent. The projections were issued just before Commerce’s latest PCE release, which estimated that the index rose to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 3.8 percent in the first quarter, up from 1.7 percent in the fourth.