Chart of the Month | What Will the New Fed Chair Watch?

For the first time in nearly a decade, there's a new chair at the Federal Reserve. That's worth paying attention to, and not just because of the headlines. Every Fed chair comes in watching something different, shaped by the economic challenge of their era.

The chart below is a window into that history. It traces the Men's Underwear Index against the S&P 500, certainly an unconventional way to gauge the health of the American consumer.

What Each Era Demanded

This month's chart is thanks to past Fed Chair Alan Greenspan, who tracked men's underwear sales as a proxy for consumer confidence. He believed that when people feel financially squeezed, one of the first things they postpone is replacing basic clothing. It sounds unusual, but it was precisely right for his era. 

Ben Bernanke came in with a different set of questions. After 2008, the number that mattered most was the spread between corporate bond yields and safe government debt. Bernanke believed that economic contagion was the risk, and credit markets were where it would first show up. 

Janet Yellen, who succeeded Bernanke, watched the U-6, a broad underemployment metric that captures discouraged workers and involuntary part-timers. Why? Because at that time, the unemployment rate was telling a more flattering story than the job market could factually support.

What the Chart Shows

The Men's Underwear Index and Consumer Price Index, tracked against the S&P 500 and indexed to January 2015, illustrates the kind of signal Greenspan was after. Over the 11 years through early 2026, the price of men's underwear rose approximately 30 percent while the S&P 500 gained roughly 227 percent. The Men's Underwear Index data showed consumer confidence cooling in late 2019, before the pandemic made that obvious, and captured the post-pandemic supply chain spike in 2021 and 2022 as it was happening. 

In March 2026, web searches for "men's underwear" reached their highest level on record, coinciding with the transition. Whether that reads as a signal or a coincidence is up for debate. But the real value lies in understanding why a Fed chair (past or present) considers certain data worth watching in the first place.

What This Means for You

A new chair can mean many things, but perhaps most importantly, it is this: the questions shaping interest rate decisions, credit conditions, and long-term growth expectations are being asked differently than they were a year, 5 years, or even a decade ago. That context matters, regardless of what the markets do in the short-term.