Supply Chain Index

What this is

The Supply Chain Index is a daily-refreshed reading of global supply-chain pressure. The headline number is the Federal Reserve Bank of New York's Global Supply Chain Pressure Index (GSCPI), one of the most widely-cited barometers of whether the world's goods are moving with more or less friction than normal. A reading of 0 is the long-run average; positive means tighter-than-normal supply conditions, negative means slack.

Why it exists

Global supply chains are usually invisible until they break. Between 2020 and 2023 they broke publicly and expensively, and the gap between headline "the supply chain is in crisis" coverage and any real gauge of when the breakage was easing was wide. The GSCPI closes that gap, but it lives in a research corner of the New York Fed website and moves quietly on a monthly cadence.

This site makes the reading legible: one headline number, its plain-English interpretation, its history since 1998, and the direction it is heading. No login, no paywall, no dashboard tour.

What we do to the number

Almost nothing. The site republishes the GSCPI without altering the underlying values. It layers a small set of derived readings on top — period-over-period changes, historical percentile, all-time records — and translates the raw z-score into a plain-English band (“severe stress”, “elevated pressure”, “around normal”, “well below normal”). The full recipe, including the exact thresholds, is on the methodology page.

Voice

There is no marketing layer over the math. The index does not claim to predict recessions, freight rates, or supplier lead times. It reports what the underlying series shows and translates it into language a reader can act on. Where the reading is boring, the site says so. Where the reading is extreme, the site says that too.

Clay Indices family

The Supply Chain Index is part of the Clay Indices family, administered by George Clay. Clay Indices treats methodology as a product: every index in the family publishes a complete methodology document; every methodology is rules-based; the boundary of what each index measures is part of the claim, not a footnote to it. Sibling sites include the Total Market Index, the RareEarth Index, the Climate50 Index, and the True Cost Index. The full family is at clayindices.com.

Attribution

The underlying data is public and produced by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. This site is an independent presentation of that data and is not affiliated with, sponsored by, or endorsed by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York or the Federal Reserve System. Nothing here is investment advice.

Methodology questions, corrections, and partnership inquiries are welcome via the contact page.