The rates desk · read live, and marked fetched or derived

What money costs,
and who says so.

The range the Federal Open Market Committee is holding and the day it last moved. The five overnight rates the New York Fed publishes every morning, with the percentile band and the dollar volume underneath each one, and the SOFR Averages and Index record that arrives beside them. The Treasury’s par yield curve, and the spread between the two-year and the ten-year drawn back as far as Treasury will serve it, with every stretch of inversion shaded. And the prime rate, worked out from the target range in front of you rather than quoted from anywhere.

Two sources, no key, no account, and — for everything above — no server of ours in the middle: your browser asks markets.newyorkfed.org and home.treasury.gov directly. Every figure on this page is marked fetched or derived, and a derived one says the arithmetic that made it. Nothing here is typed in by hand and nothing is remembered between loads. If a file has never answered, the panel that needed it prints no number at all. If it answered earlier and the newest attempt failed, the figures stay where they are and the panel’s status line says which read they came from — a dated figure is a better answer than a blank panel, and an undated one is worse than both.

Nothing has been read yet.

The policy rate

The range the Committee is holding.

The FOMC does not set one number; it sets a quarter-point range and steers the market into it. The range below is not this page’s reading of a statement — it is the targetRateFrom and targetRateTo fields the New York Fed publishes on the effective federal funds rate record itself, so the range and the rate it is steering arrive in the same response and cannot disagree.

Federal funds target range

waiting for the feed

Reading the New York Fed’s reference rates…

Every move in the read

The target range is read across the whole EFFR history this desk pulls; each row below is a day on which the published range was different from the day before it.

    Reference rates

    What the money market actually paid.

    Five overnight rates, each the volume-weighted median of a real day’s trading, published by the New York Fed at about eight in the morning Eastern for the business day before. Two are unsecured — EFFR and OBFR, banks lending to each other without collateral. Three are secured on Treasury collateral — SOFR, TGCR and BGCR, which is repo. The band beside each rate is the 1st to 99th percentile of the trades behind it; the volume is how much money changed hands to produce the number.

    New York Fed reference rates

    waiting for the feed

    Reading the reference rates…

    SOFR Averages and Index

    The New York Fed also publishes compounded averages of SOFR over 30, 90 and 180 days, and an index that compounds it from the series’ first day. These are what a floating-rate loan actually references — a borrower pays an average, not a single overnight print. This record carries its own date, which is normally a day ahead of the rates above it.

    The curve and the spread

    Ten years minus two.

    Lending for ten years normally costs more than lending for two, so the spread between them is normally positive. When it goes negative the curve is inverted: the market is paying more to be lent to for two years than for ten, which is what it does when it expects the policy rate to be lower later. Every stretch below zero in the chart is shaded, and the shading is drawn from the data rather than from a list of dates.

    The 2s10s spread

    waiting for the feed

    Reading the Treasury’s daily yield curve…

    How far back

    The whole curve, on the latest day in the file

    Borrowing

    What the policy rate becomes.

    Nobody borrows at the federal funds rate. What households and businesses meet is prime — the rate a bank charges the customers it likes most, and the base a great many card and variable-rate loans are priced off — and, for a house, the thirty-year fixed mortgage. The first of these follows the target range by an arithmetic convention. The second does not follow it at all closely, which is the point of showing them together.

    The prime rate

    waiting for the feed

    derived

    Waiting for the target range this figure is computed from…

    This desk reads no published prime rate, because no keyless, browser-readable feed of one exists. What is printed above is arithmetic on a number this page did fetch, using the convention US banks follow — and a convention is not a guarantee. A bank may set its prime wherever it likes, and the surveyed rate can sit a day or two behind a change in the target range. Where this figure and your lender disagree, your lender is right.

    Freddie Mac Primary Mortgage Market Survey

    waiting for the relay

    Asking this site’s own relay for the survey…

    The survey, week by week

    THE ONE THING ON THIS PAGE THAT IS NOT READ DIRECTLY. Freddie Mac serves PMMS_history.csv to anything that asks, but sends no Access-Control-Allow-Origin header, so a browser on labs.llc is not permitted to read it. This panel therefore asks pmms-relay.php on this site’s own origin, which asks Freddie Mac, caches the answer for six hours and hands back the last 300 weeks of it — just under six years of Thursdays. If this copy of the page is being served without PHP the relay is not there, and the panel says so rather than showing anything. The survey is weekly, published Thursdays, and is a survey of lenders — not a quote, and not a rate you have been offered.

    What is not here

    Two things this desk will not print.

    A rates desk is expected to carry both of these, and this one does not. Neither is an oversight, and neither is coming back without a source behind it — a number on a page has to have come from somewhere, and if it did not, it is decoration.

    Deposit APYs — savings, money market, CDs

    The FDIC publishes national deposit rates and rate caps, and it publishes them as a web page. fdic.gov/national-rates-and-rate-caps delivers the figures inside its HTML with no data file behind it, and the FDIC’s own machine-readable service at api.fdic.gov/banks/ — which is CORS-open, keyless and works — is BankFind: it serves institutions, financials and summaries, and its router answers /banks/national-rates, /banks/rates, /banks/deposit-rates and /banks/ratecaps with a 404 that names the route it does not have. There is no deposit-rate endpoint to read. Rather than scrape a page whose shape can change on any Monday, or quote a figure with no live source under it, this desk shows no deposit rates at all.

    The next FOMC meeting date

    A hardcoded meeting date is a lie the moment it passes, and there is nothing to read instead. The Federal Reserve’s calendar page at federalreserve.gov/monetarypolicy/fomccalendars.htm is live — it answers 200 with about 165 KB of HTML — and it sends no Access-Control-Allow-Origin header, so a browser on labs.llc is not permitted to read it. It is also a page, not a data file: the dates are in the markup, and there is no calendar feed behind it. The monetary-policy press feed at federalreserve.gov/feeds/press_monetary.xml is live and likewise sends no CORS header. What this desk shows in place of a schedule is the thing a schedule is a proxy for: the target range the Committee is currently holding, the day it last changed, and by how much — all three read out of the New York Fed’s own data rather than out of a statement. When the next decision lands, the range in the panel above changes by itself.

    And one thing that is here, but not directly

    The mortgage panel is the only figure on this page that does not come straight from the publisher to your browser. Freddie Mac sends no CORS header, so it is relayed through pmms-relay.php on this site. That relay has no URL parameter, talks to exactly one hardcoded address, and caches for six hours. If it is missing altogether — a copy of this site served without PHP — the panel prints no rate and says so. If Freddie Mac is the one that is down, the relay serves the last copy it took, for up to a week, and marks it stale; the panel then prints that week’s figures with a sentence saying the relay could not reach Freddie Mac on this read and roughly how old the copy is. The week the survey is for is printed either way, so the age of the figure is always on the page. Past that week nothing is served at all: the relay answers 502 with a sentence and no numbers in it, and the panel prints no rate.

    About

    A reading room, not a terminal.

    Two publishers stand behind almost everything here. The Federal Reserve Bank of New York publishes the five overnight reference rates, and the SOFR Averages and Index alongside them, at markets.newyorkfed.org, keyless and open to browsers, and its EFFR record carries the FOMC’s target range as a field. The U.S. Department of the Treasury publishes the daily par yield curve at home.treasury.gov as a CSV per calendar year, also keyless and open to browsers. Your browser reads both directly; nothing of ours sits in between, nothing is stored, and no figure survives a reload. Freddie Mac’s weekly mortgage survey is the single exception and the page says so where it appears.

    Every figure is marked. Fetched means it arrived in a response, as a field, and this page printed it. Derived means this page computed it from figures it fetched, and the arithmetic is written next to it — the 2s10s spread is a subtraction of two columns in one row of the Treasury file, and prime is the target range’s upper bound plus three points, which is a convention rather than a published rate. There is no third category. If a number could not be fetched or honestly derived, it is not on the page, and the band above says which numbers those are.

    None of this is live in the sense a trading screen is live. The reference rates are published the following morning for the previous business day; the yield curve is published in the evening for the same day; the mortgage survey is weekly. So every figure carries the effective date its publisher gave it, alongside the minute this page read it, and those two are different things. Publishers also revise: the New York Fed marks a revised record and this desk shows whatever the file says now, not what it said yesterday.

    It is not advice, and it is not a quote. Nothing here is a forecast, a valuation, a recommendation, or a rate you can transact at. An inverted curve is a fact about two yields and not a prediction. The prime figure is arithmetic on a convention and your bank is free to ignore it. Where this desk and its publishers disagree, the publishers are right: markets.newyorkfed.org and home.treasury.gov carry the full series, their documentation and their revision history.