Economic Surprise Index, latest reading

How economic releases have been landing against consensus, as one weighted index. Each release's surprise (actual minus consensus, in the indicator's own unit) is standardised against that indicator's own prior surprises (at most 40 earlier releases; fewer than 8 and the release is not scored), clipped at plus or minus four, weighted by importance (high 1.0, medium 0.5, low 0.2) and averaged over a trailing 90-day window. Inflation releases are kept out of the headline (a hot print is not good news). A positive index means data has been beating expectations and a negative one means it has been missing them. The latest reading pools every country whose releases qualify; meta.universe.countries says how many do.

IT IS NOT THE LEVEL OF THE ECONOMY. An economy can be weak and still print a positive surprise index, because the index measures the gap to forecast rather than the number itself.

event_count is how many scored headline releases fall inside the trailing 90-day window (window_days), so a small count (thin) is a thin reading rather than a quiet quarter.

THE UNDERLYING CALENDAR IS NOT SERVED. Per-event rows, their scheduled times and their consensus figures are not available through this API at any endpoint; only this derived aggregate is.