Resource Of The Week: Federal Reserve Economic Data, Or FRED

Has anyone bothered to check out this blog’s “About” page lately? Well, last week I updated a bunch of material, including a number of graphs. They’re pretty snappy, huh? It turns out the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis has made a substantial amount of economic data (Federal Reserve Economic Data, or FRED) available to the public on their Economic Research website under “FRED Economic Data”. From the FAQ section:

FRED is a database of over 41,000 economic time series from 38 sources. With FRED, you can download data in Microsoft Excel and text formats and view charts of data series.

The database is divided into the following economic times series:

• Money, Banking, & Finance (3,617)
• National Accounts (704)
• Population, Employment & Labor Markets (2,211)
• Production & Business Activity (1,325)
• Prices (1,599)
• International Data (5,047)
• U.S. Regional Data (27,444)

A number of options for browsing this data, as well as several tools, are located on the sidebar of the FRED Economic Data page. And using the data, one can generate a customizable graph, like this one entitled “University of Michigan: Consumer Sentiment (UMCSENT)” from two days ago:

Elsewhere on the page is “FRED News,” “Popular Series,” “FRED At A Glance,” and “Latest Releases.”

I’m still playing around with FRED, but so far it’s been a neat tool for retrieving and graphing the “official” numbers (keep that last part in mind and you should be okay).

You can access FRED on the St. Louis Fed’s Economic Research site here.

(Editor’s note: Link added to “Resources” page)