Flow of funds accounts are a system of interrelated balance sheets for a nation, calculated periodically. There are two types of balance sheets, those showing
The sectors and instruments are listed below.
These balance sheets measure levels of assets and liabilities. From each balance sheet a corresponding flows statement can be derived by subtracting the levels data for the preceding period from the data for the current period. (In the statistical analysis of time series, this operation is known as "first differencing.") The change in a level item between two adjacent periods is known as a "fund flow"; hence the name for these accounts.
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The flow of funds (FF) accounts of the United States are prepared by the Flow of Funds section of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, and published quarterly in a publication called Release Z.1. The historical FF data, starting in 1952:I (quarterly) or yearend 1945 (annual), are available on the Fed's website.
The flow of funds accounts follow naturally from double-entry bookkeeping; every financial asset is also a liability of some domestic or foreign human entity. A fundamental fact about any economic sector is its balance sheet, a breakdown of its physical and financial assets, and of its liabilities. The only physical assets noted in the FF accounts are those of private nonfinancial sectors.
Nonfinancial sectors:
Financial sector: