The Fed was far more secretive than it is now. It waited weeks to announce policy decisions. In 1976, the Fed actually stopped producing detailed records of its meetings to prevent policy discussions from being disclosed. And officials feared that it would be easy to infer the direction of policy from the tone of the staff forecast. Nancy Teeters, a Fed governor, read aloud the opening paragraph of the Green Book and told her colleagues that before it could be shared with the public, “practically every one of those adjectives would disappear.”

So the Fed struck a deal with Mr. Fauntroy. The Fed would release the Redbook instead — two weeks before each meeting of the Federal Open Market Committee.

This seemed like a victory for transparency, but in the view of Fed officials, the opposite was true. By releasing the Redbook two weeks early, the Fed hoped to underscore that the contents were out of date. The committee would have newer information by the time it made decisions.

The book also got a new cover. At first it was sometimes described as the “Tan Book,” but we now think of it as beige.

The new book made its public debut in June 1983.

In the intervening years, some studies have argued that the Beige Book provides information about the direction of economic or monetary policy that is not available from other sources. Other studies disagree. The variation is not surprising because the studies are based on assigning numerical scores to narrative reports, which is more art than science. None of the studies, moreover, find a lot of added value.

“While the Beige Book does have some predictive power,” concluded the Minneapolis Fed, “the media and Fed watchers would do well to put aside the Beige Book and focus on private sector forecasts in their attempts to predict monetary policy.”