The heavier line is the Fed's own target range midpoint (FRED series DFEDTARL/DFEDTARU), right axis, one point per actual FOMC decision -- not one point per calendar day, since the source data just repeats the prior value on every day between meetings. The lighter line is total nonfarm payroll employment (the same series behind the Employment Trend), left axis, restricted to 2016 forward to match the rate data's real coverage -- this ingest doesn't reach back before 2016-07-30. Worth being honest about the resolution mismatch rather than implying a tighter read than the data supports: the rate line moves on the actual day the Fed changed it, while the employment line only has one real reading a year, so a short-term reaction in employment right after a rate change wouldn't show up here even if it existed. Weekly initial unemployment claims, the resolution-matched companion series for that, are in the two panels below instead.

Initial unemployment claims (FRED series ICSA), weekly -- the actual resolution-matched companion series to the rate data. Shown here at true scale rather than clipped or log-scaled, because the honest story is the scale itself: claims spiked from roughly 210,000 to a peak of 6,137,000 in the three weeks after March 14, 2020 -- a roughly 29x jump, the single largest and fastest move in this entire series by a wide margin. That spike is real, not a data error, and compressing it to fit alongside ordinary weeks would hide the actual size of the shock. The tradeoff: at this scale, the week-to-week texture in every other period gets flattened near the bottom of the chart -- see the panel below for that. What actually pulled this line back down is its own real, traceable story -- forty-four years of research behind one of the vaccines that helped make the recovery possible.

Same data, but with March 2020 through December 2021 removed rather than just visually compressed -- claims stayed well above their normal range through that entire stretch, not just during the initial spike, so it isn't a single clean outlier to clip. The gap in each line marks exactly what's excluded; nothing is hidden, it's cut out and named. This is the view worth reading for the actual week-to-week relationship between claims and rate decisions in ordinary conditions -- the one the full-scale panel above can't show because the 2020 spike dominates its own axis.