A game that argues with you about real economics owes you its working. Every number on screen is one of three things, and this page says which — because the failure worth avoiding is a figure we made up sitting next to one we can prove, in the same font, at the same size.
← Back to the gameThe scheme is borrowed from the Econ Atlas, the shared dataset behind the Screwcap games, so that a number means the same thing here as it does in the others.
Fetched from FRED at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, cached for an hour, and shown with the date of the print. If the feed fails, the strip disappears — it never falls back to a constant, because a stale invention that looks live is exactly what this page exists to prevent.
| Shown as | Series | Published by | Class |
|---|---|---|---|
| FED FUNDS | DFF | Federal Reserve | A |
| CPI YoY | CPIAUCSL, year-over-year | U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics | A |
| UNEMPLOYMENT | UNRATE | U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics | A |
| REAL GDP | A191RL1Q225SBEA | U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis | A |
| US10Y | DGS10 | Federal Reserve | A |
| REAL 10Y | DFII10 | Federal Reserve | A |
| BROAD USD | DTWEXBGS | Federal Reserve | A |
| S&P 500 | SP500 | S&P Dow Jones Indices LLC | A |
| DOW | DJIA | S&P Dow Jones Indices LLC | A |
| VIX | VIXCLS | Cboe | A |
BROAD USD is not the DXY. It is the Federal Reserve's own broad trade-weighted dollar index — a different basket and a different number from ICE's. We label it accordingly rather than borrowing the more famous name for a figure that isn't it.
On the index levels. S&P 500, the Dow and VIX are reported here as current levels, with their owners credited. Those levels are facts and are quoted daily by every newspaper in the world. What we do not do is ship their historical series as a dataset of our own — that is a licensed database product, and FRED's ten-year window on them is that licence showing through. The marks are used descriptively, to report a number, and imply no endorsement or association.
A run is not a live feed. It is a historical scenario, and the figures move with it.
| What | Where it comes from | Class |
|---|---|---|
| The Fed's real rate path (Watch Mode, "You vs the Real Fed") | The actual policy rate for that era | A |
| Opening conditions (GDP, inflation, unemployment, rate) | Published figures for the quarter the scenario opens in | A |
| Headlines and dated events | Real events, on their real dates, filtered to the years the scenario actually covers | A |
| Presidential quotes | Things those presidents said, placed in the quarters they were in office | A |
| Quarterly gold and oil | Our own quarter-by-quarter figures for the era — close to the record, not extracted from it | R |
| Quarterly index levels and FX | As above: representative of where those markets stood, authored by us | R |
| What the economy does when you move rates | An expectations-augmented model — Phillips, Okun, Taylor, policy lags, credibility | R |
| The advisor, the board, the Senate, the live feed | Written for this game. Dr. Marcus Feldman is not a person | B |
The middle rows are the honest ones to be clear about. A quarterly gold price for 1980 in this game is about right and is there to make the era feel like itself — it is not a quote you should cite. Where it matters, that is what the R means.
There are no usage statistics anywhere in this game. There used to be — a nav counter that said 142 economists were watching, a landing page that claimed 105,847 players, and a header line that started at 105 and climbed on a timer. None of it was measured. All of it is gone, and nothing replaced it, because the honest version of an unmeasured number is no number.
Nothing here is financial advice, and a simulation that fits history is still a simulation.
If a figure here is wrong we would rather know. contact@screwcap.games — the changelog records what changed and when.