Use cases & endpoints
FOMC minutes API — full text, searchable and dated
Minutes are the committee's reasoning rather than its decision, and they arrive on a delay — roughly three weeks after the meeting they describe. That gap is the single most important fact about using them: the discussion is old news by the time it is public, but the language is new information the moment it lands.
For research this creates a recurring trap. Attaching minutes to the meeting date implies the market knew the committee's internal debate weeks before it did, which will make any event study built on them look far better than reality.
Hindcast stores both dates on every set of minutes and defaults point-in-time queries to the release. The text is sectioned — staff review, participants' views, policy action — so a question about how the committee discussed one topic returns the relevant discussion rather than the whole document.
hindcast — session
previewhindcast> how did participants discuss inflation risks in these minutes?
→ tool: cb_minutes { bank:"FED", meeting:"...", section:"participants_views" }
✓ the relevant passages with meeting and release dates
source: FOMC minutes, released after the meeting they describe
What's covered
- Meeting date and release date stored separately on every document
- Minutes sectioned by staff review, participants' views and policy action
- Full historical archive rather than a recent window
- Passage-level anchors for citable extracts
- Linked to the statement and any projections from the same meeting
- Point-in-time queries default to the release date
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Questions
How long after a meeting are minutes published?
About three weeks under the current convention, which is why the release date is the one that matters for anything measuring market reaction.
Are the minutes and the statement the same source?
No, and treating them as one series is a common mistake. The statement is released on the decision day; the minutes come later and describe the same meeting in far more detail.
Related
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