Keynes Watch is a free, auto-updating library of the data macro and rates investors actually trade on: Fed plumbing and overnight rates, Treasury issuance and fiscal flows, near-real-time labor income, and China's monetary, credit and property cycle. Every series is fetched by an open-source Python pipeline that talks directly to primary sources — the New York Fed's Markets API, Treasury Fiscal Data, BEA, FRED, the PBOC, NBS and MOF — and refreshes automatically as new data are released; nothing is rekeyed from secondary aggregators.
I'm Chenning Xu, a financial analyst focused on rates and global macro. I built this site because the macro moves that matter rarely start in headline data — they show up first in the plumbing: the right tail of the SOFR distribution, the TGA's drain and rebuild, daily tax withholding, the mix of bills and duration the Treasury chooses to sell. Keynes Watch began as my own dashboard for tracking those signals, published so anyone can use it. The name is a nod to Keynes, Kalecki, Minsky and Godley — economists who took accounting identities seriously. Get in touch: chenningxuecon@gmail.com · LinkedIn · GitHub
From the overnight market outward: policy implementation, duration supply, the fiscal engine, and the labor data that leads the official releases.
Where policy meets plumbing: is EFFR drifting inside the band, are SOFR tails widening, are reserves still ample as QT runs? These are the questions that decide when the Fed stops.
The supply side of the duration market and the liquidity side of fiscal policy: what the Treasury sells, what the debt stock costs, and how the TGA swings bank reserves week to week.
Withheld payroll taxes hit the Treasury's account daily — employment × hours × wages with no sampling and no revisions, weeks ahead of payrolls. The rest of the block rounds out the picture the Fed reacts to.
The accounting behind the cycle: the Kalecki–Levy profits identity and Godley's sectoral balances, built quarterly from NIPA. A deficit is always someone's income — these pages show whose.
The policy-rate chain from the 7-day reverse repo to LPR, the credit aggregates that lead activity, and the property adjustment driving both.
China's corridor system in one view — SLF ceiling, excess-reserve floor, 7-day reverse repo anchor — plus the LPR chain, reserve requirements, monetary aggregates and the PBOC's own balance sheet.
Total social financing and new loans — the credit impulse that leads Chinese activity by two to three quarters, now increasingly driven by government bond issuance rather than private borrowing.
The monthly pulse of the real economy, starting with consumption: headline retail sales plus the splits that carry the signal — urban/rural, catering vs goods, 16 above-quota categories and online retail, with trade-in subsidies and the property chain written all over them.
The epicenter of China's balance-sheet recession risk: development investment, starts and sales, 70-city prices, and the land revenue that used to fund local government.
The same accounting identities as the U.S. pages, rebuilt from the NBS flow-of-funds accounts: investment-driven corporate profits, the world-record household-saving drag, and the post-2020 private surplus mirroring the government deficit.