Introducing PEPI: Real-Time Trade Policy Intelligence
Commercial data sources. One composite index. Updated daily.
Trade policy doesn’t move slowly anymore. In 2026, a single executive order can shift tariff expectations across an entire sector before markets open. A Federal Register filing lands at midnight. A press briefing reshapes import cost assumptions by noon. The institutions that track this, the BLS, Census, and USITC, publish the data. The problem has never been access. It’s been synthesized.
“Campaigns are only as smart as the signals they act upon.” The same is true for supply chains, trade desks, and policy analysts. PEPI was built for exactly that gap.
Today we’re introducing PEPI — the Presidential Economic Pressure Index: a real-time composite index built entirely on public government APIs, updated daily, and available as a live dashboard. It measures the cumulative pressure U.S. trade policy is applying to domestic markets — not as a political statement, but as a structured data product derived from the same sources institutional analysts use individually. We just connect them.
What PEPI Measures
PEPI is not a sentiment index. It doesn’t scrape news headlines or weight Twitter volume. Every signal in the index is sourced from a federal government data publication — the same primary sources economists, analysts, and policymakers rely on.
The index aggregates across three signal layers, each representing a different stage of the policy-to-market pipeline:
- Announcement Signals Federal Register filings, executive orders, and White House policy statements. These represent declared intent — the earliest measurable signal in the pipeline.
- Trade Flow Signals Actual import and export volume changes from Census FT-900 and USITC Harmonized Tariff Schedule data. This is where declared policy meets realized trade behavior.
- Economic Impact Signals BLS Producer Price Index, employment in trade-sensitive sectors, and FRED economic indicators. These are the downstream effects — what the pressure is actually doing to the economy once it moves through the system.
Each signal is normalized against its historical range, weighted by relevance to current policy activity, and combined into a single daily composite score. The higher the index, the greater the measurable pressure U.S. trade policy is applying to domestic market conditions.
The Data Architecture
Every source is a primary government publication accessed via its official public API. No scrapers. No third-party aggregators. No black boxes.
How the API Access Works
PEPI is an infrastructure product first. The dashboard is the output — the pipeline is the product.
Why This Matters Post-2025
The trade policy environment that existed before 2025 — slow-moving, institutionally legible, largely predictable in its mechanics — is gone. The current environment is characterized by executive-first policy moves, compressed announcement-to-implementation timelines, and a deliberate blurring of the line between negotiating posture and actual policy.
That volatility has a specific cost: planning cycles that used to operate on quarterly data are now broken by weekly policy shifts. Supply chain teams, trade desks, and policy analysts need signals that run at the speed of the market, not at the speed of government publication schedules.
The data was always public. The infrastructure to synthesize it in real time wasn’t. That’s what PEPI provides.
PEPI doesn’t predict policy. It measures it — with the same rigor and sourcing that institutional analysts apply, but at a cadence and accessibility that serves anyone who needs to act on the information, not just those with the infrastructure to aggregate it themselves.
This is the practical application of what we mean by Transforming Data into Action: fifteen agencies’ worth of public information, synthesized into one number you can track, integrate, and act on — updated every morning before markets open.
The Dashboard Is Live
PEPI is available now at pepi.apiautomations.com — no login required. The full methodology, data source documentation, and API access details are available through our research team.
For API access, dataset requests, or methodology questions: [email protected]
