The Beige Book — economics by talking to people — is one of the Fed's more interesting institutions. It seems especially useful now, when conventional economic measures are having a hard time dealing with crazy times 1/ 
The current edition seems consistent with the scattered high-frequency data we're all looking at: after a few months of rapid recovery that still left us deep in the hole we're looking at a slow upward slog 2/ federalreserve.gov/monetarypolicy…
One interesting observation is that one thing holding recovery back is child care or rather the lack thereof 3/
Also interesting how much darker the tone is than in the corresponding report from 2012 4/ minneapolisfed.org/beige-book-rep…
Anyway, if we're in Trump's "super V", nobody told the Fed 5/ businessinsider.com/trump-economy-…
