Open enrollment at work could mean some sticker shock. I'm David Brancaccio in Los Angeles. First, our

central bankers gather in Washington this morning to play the three-dimensional chess of whether jobs,

inflation, or growth can let them drop interest rates further. Some of the Fed's normal views into the

economy will be at hand today an index of home

prices from 20 cities and a reading on consumer confidence. That's data from private companies.

But because of the budget impasse, the government data Federal Reserve depends on is missing.

Our Nancy Marshall-Gensur covers Washington.

Some of the data from the regional Federal Reserve Banks comes from actually talking to people.

And the regions all have their specialties.

Danielle DiMartino Booth is founder and CEO of QI Research.

Before that, she was an advisor at the Dallas Fed.

Dallas is called the Energy Fed because we have such a good handle on what is

happening in the oil patch as well as what's happening with immigration flows and how that

affects the U.S. economy. Other Fed Bank surveys cover pharmaceutical, food and chemical manufacturing.

They ask, are you hiring or firing people, raising prices? Do you have a

backlog? Kathy Busjansik, chief economist at Nationwide, says you can stitch the answers together

to get a broad idea of how the economy is doing. What's happening in employment, new orders,

shipment, and inflation. So it kind of offers a nice swath of data.

Then there's the beige book, a mashup of lots of anecdotes from the regional Fed banks,

tidbits like diners in Atlanta refusing to splurge on desserts and drinks,

and higher credit card delinquency rates in St. Louis.

David Wilcox is a former Fed economist now with the Peterson Institute for International Economics. He says some Fed banks also

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