Susan Hume McIntosh

The integrated macroeconomic accounts (IMAs), produced jointly by the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) and the Federal Reserve Board (FRB), present a sequence of accounts that relate income, saving, investment in real and financial assets, and asset revaluations to changes in net worth. This paper first provides some background information on the IMAs and on their construction. Next, it discusses the usefulness of the IMAs, focusing for instance on the evolution of household net worth and its components, a set of series that has appeared frequently in discussions of the causes and effects of the recent financial crisis. It also discusses some of the challenges associated with integrating nonfinancial and financial data sources, that is, the current and capital accounts statistics from ...