Chart assignment

Charts to read and discuss

Read each chart, then answer its questions. Every chart shows its source and date; open it for a table of the numbers and the data to download.

  1. How much US debt does the Federal Reserve own?
  2. What is the unemployment rate in each country?

Chart 1 of 2 · Federal budget

How much US debt does the Federal Reserve own?

The interactive chart needs JavaScript. The numbers are on the chart's page.

The Federal Reserve held $4.58 trillion of Treasury securities on October 28, 2026, compared with a peak of $5.77 trillion in May 2022. Its holdings jumped when it bought Treasuries to support the economy after the 2008 financial crisis and in the 2020 pandemic, when they more than doubled in two years, and fell as it let them run off from 2022. Each point is the last weekly figure of the month, including TIPS' inflation adjustment.

Questions to discuss

  1. In one sentence of your own, what does this chart show?
  2. Find the biggest change or difference in the chart. What might explain it?
  3. Who collected these numbers, and how recent are they? What else would you want to know before drawing a conclusion?

Source: Federal Reserve Bank of New York, System Open Market Account (SOMA) Holdings (The SOMA Holdings data is subject to the Terms of Use posted at newyorkfed.org. The New York Fed is not responsible for publication.) · Data as of Oct 28, 2026

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Chart 2 of 2 · World

What is the unemployment rate in each country?

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In 2025, 4.2% of workers in the United States were unemployed, against 4.8% worldwide; the highest rate was 34.2% in Eswatini, and the lowest 0.1%, in Qatar. Search 182 countries and territories. These are the International Labour Organization's estimates, which count people without work who are looking for it and fill gaps where a country runs no regular survey, so they can differ from a country's own figures.

How to read this chart

Each bar is the share of a country's workers who have no job and are looking for one, estimated by the International Labour Organization. The dashed line is the world. People who aren't looking for work, such as students and retirees, aren't counted as unemployed at all.

Questions to discuss

  1. Is the United States above or below the world rate, and by about how many percentage points?
  2. A country can have low unemployment while many people earn very little. How is that possible?
  3. Why would someone who has given up looking for work not count as unemployed? Does that make the number more or less useful?

Source: World Bank, World Development Indicators: Unemployment, total (% of total labor force) (modeled ILO estimate) (CC BY 4.0 (credit the World Bank)) · Data as of Dec 31, 2025

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