The FRED Cult

Regular readers know that I’m a big fan of FRED, the St. Louis Federal Reserve’s Economic Data. This database contains huge numbers of economic data series that are easily searchable.

A user can effortlessly transform FRED data into a usable chart, the kind of which you’ve seen many times on this site (for example, see the ISM chart from yesterday). I’m not alone in my admiration of FRED. The Washington Post writes:

Nobel Laureate economist Paul Krugman is a huge FRED fan. Harvard economist Greg Mankiw uses it. Former Fed chairman Ben Bernanke cited it in a textbook. The site Business Insider called it “the most amazing economics Web site in the world.”

“It definitely has a cult following,” said Eddy Elfenbein, a financial analyst in Washington and editor of CrossingWallStreet.com. For him, FRED has emerged as the central hub for finding and sorting through the reams of financial data. He can spend hours looking up trivia such as the historical price of copper in Britain. “It’s addictive,” Elfenbein said.

There are well over 200,000 different series at FRED. A personal favorite is brick production in England and Wales, 1785 to 1815.

Posted by on August 5th, 2014 at 11:08 am


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