As the world enters uncharted territory with the global pandemic, sudden rise of new variants, widespread uncertainty, and country-wide shutdowns, a group of New York Fed researchers has developed a new index to measure the critical factors underlying all global economic activity—supply chains. The record-high supply chain pressures that have led to high prices, product shortages, and four-decade-high inflation in the United States may have begun the process of easing down, according to the new Global Supply Chain Pressure Index (GSCPI) released by Gianluca Benigno, Julian di Giovanni, Jan J. J. Groen, and Adam I. Noble. Measuring 27 variables, mostly extracted from available data since 1997, the GSCPI “seems to suggest that global supply chain pressures, while still historically high, have peaked and might start to moderate somewhat going forward,” according to a blog post written by the research team. According to the GSCPI, the graph peaked after the discovery …