Behind the Scenes with the FRED Team
Members of the FRED (Federal Reserve Economic Data) team recently took to the St. Louis Fed’s Economy Museum to discuss all things FRED: the Bank’s long-standing commitment to public service, FRED’s intrinsic value as a data aggregator, a few of the more interesting finds in FRED, and where FRED and its information services siblings might head next.
What Is Fred?
A little team runs this big engine called FRED. To start, what is FRED?
Katrina Stierholz: FRED is an economic database that we provide as a public service. It’s a tool that brings economic data together from over 80 sources, and we have half a million series. Users can come to the database and get data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics or the Bureau of Economic Analysis. They can put data together, they can do transformations of data, and they can ask questions of the data and learn about the economy using FRED.
Why is it important to provide this public service?
Stierholz: In the modern world, people use data to make decisions. What we’re doing is helping people understand their world and make judgments. So, when we provide data about the economy or about one’s region, people can understand that better.
Keith Taylor: FRED users are consumers who are making decisions, like how to get a mortgage, or businesses making a decision about where they might invest or release a new product, and academics using data to further their research. So, it’s a wide audience.
Why does the St. Louis Fed offer it?
Stierholz: It’s an interesting thing, because it grew organically out of work that was done in the early 1960s. We had a research director, Homer Jones, who decided to start sending data to people to help inform monetary policy. So, FRED was really intended initially to be a public service, to help people understand the economy.
That public service piece has been a thread that’s come through to the present, but, of course, what has changed is how we deliver that public service. Back then, it was paper, initially three tables. Now it’s a database, half a million series. It’s got amazing tools and things you can do with the data. You can share it, you can download it, but the public service piece is still there.
Some might ask why it matters that the public has free access to data. What’s the goal in providing this?
Stierholz: One thing I’m particularly interested in is data literacy: helping people understand how to use data, how to examine data critically, and how to make use of it in their lives. We provide data, but we also provide ways for people to understand data.
What it does is help people become data informed — even data comfortable or data competent — where they can look at data to understand their world at large.
Taylor: FRED has a wide range of users, from high school students to Nobel Prize winners. Most of them, though, are novice data users and need a little help to make the most of FRED. And this is really an area where data literacy can help them ask good questions and be confident that the answers that they are getting from FRED are accurate.
FRED has some siblings: GeoFRED and ALFRED. Can you tell us about them?
Yvetta Fortova: ALFRED is really archival FRED. It started back when Bob Rasche was a research director, and he really believed in the value of storing series that revise over time. Almost all the series we have in FRED do revise, and we set up ALFRED for that reason: so that you can access data on a given period and see what the data looked like.
To some people, this kind of data is very important because they can re-evaluate old economic models with the vintage data. And it’s also very popular in policymaking.
Taylor: We also have GeoFRED, which allows you to map FRED data at the U.S. level. We also have county level, metropolitan statistical area and state level data, and then, at the international level, you can map all the countries. Both GeoFRED and ALFRED are accessible as their own domains: geofred.stlouisfed.org and alfred.stlouisfed.org.
The Magic of FRED
Tell us a bit more about how FRED works.
Fortova: FRED’s magic is very simple. As the originating sources publish their data, we download the data, we do some quality controls, and then we upload the data into our FRED database. Really, all time series in FRED live in harmony, and they are displayed on a graph page where they are plotted over a continuous time. For example, you can go on FRED and access gross domestic product, which is available from 1947 to the most recent period.
We have five people on our team who work hard to make sure that data is uploaded as soon as the originating source has published the data sets. In addition, we have three more people who work on our front-end application to make sure that our website and tools are properly working.
You’re taking these credible data sources from all over the world, and FRED becomes this one-stop shop for this data. How might that be helpful for a user?
Fortova: We recognize that statistical agencies have a mission to disseminate data to users. And we, as FRED, are sympathizing with that mission. We are able to build bridges with the respective sources — for example, the U.S. Census Bureau — to help make sure that users are getting the best data experience to tell their story and understand the data.
What makes FRED unique as a public service?
Fortova: The U.S. is unique in that there is not a single statistical agency. All statistical agencies specialize in their own data indicators, and they are very good at it. They are the subject matter experts.
What FRED does is put all the data under one roof, so FRED is a data aggregator. And it’s very beneficial for users, because they can then go to FRED and find gross domestic product, which is published by the Bureau of Economic Analysis, and the unemployment rate, which is published by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, all on one website. But not only that, they can actually put all this data on one graph.
Who’s the audience for FRED?
Taylor: So, instructors and students. We also have quite a few people using FRED to make business decisions: financial professionals, analysts at corporations. We have academic-style researchers, and they’re using it to further their research. We also have a lot of journalists and bloggers who are using it to talk about economics.
One of the things that makes it easy for them is they can grab an image off of our website, tweet to it or put it in a blog.
Another project we have is the FRED Blog, with articles written twice weekly. They dive into an economic topic, then how you can demonstrate that topic in FRED. The articles are often about things happening in the news, so they’re very topical. Frequently, they also get picked up by journalists as a basis for an article.
Let’s FRED That!
What are some of the most popular or most often used series in FRED?
Fortova: The consumer price index — which is a measure of inflation and published by the Bureau of Labor Statistics — is one of the most popular series in FRED. But we have many others, such as gross domestic product from the Bureau of Economic Analysis.
It’s interesting to see how popularity changes over time based on what users are looking for. Recently, a lot of yield curve series have been gaining in popularity, especially the spread between short-term and long-term Treasuries.
Stierholz: During the financial crisis, the weekly unemployment claims data was the most popular. As unemployment went up and as people were very concerned about the economy, that series became incredibly popular and was the most popular series for quite a while. And that reflects peoples’ concerns about what’s going on. FRED actually answers peoples’ immediate questions about the economy.
What are some of the most unusual series you might find in FRED?
Fortova: One of the most notable is our extensive historical series published by the National Bureau of Economic Research. In that data set, you can find series on shipments of sinks and toilets to the U.S. during the industrialization of indoor plumbing. You can really see the correlation of the two items during that time.
We have a series published by the Bank of England of the population of England. That one goes all the way back to 1086, the year of the Domesday Book. Who would have known data existed back then?
How do you decide the data series that get put into FRED?
Fortova: In reality, the FRED team is small, and our bucket list of data sets that we wish to add to FRED is fairly large. When trying to decide what data sets to add to FRED, we look at many different aspects. We look at what kind of institution or organization the data is coming from. Is it a reliable data set? How can it benefit users? We really are making careful decisions on which data sets will hit the FRED mark.
The Future of FRED
Where will FRED go next?
Taylor: I would say in general we’ve got the U.S. macroeconomy pretty solid with our data sets. There are some gaps that we could fill, but I think the future data acquisitions will be international and probably more socioeconomic, less traditional macroeconomics.
Stierholz: One thing that might surprise people is a third of the people who come to FRED are international. So, we serve a public that is larger than the United States. We serve the world.
What do you see FRED growing into? And how do you see people using FRED?
Taylor: In the immediate future, we’re really focused on helping people find economic information or data sets, and then, once they’ve found it, to quickly understand it. And, of course, we’re always adding more data to FRED. That’s a continuous process.
Longer term, we want to focus on helping people understand the data: either pulling in additional content or working more closely with the providers of data to make sure that we’re presenting it in the best way possible so that users have the best experience.
Stierholz: We really want to focus on the user experience. Some of that will be small things that people don’t notice. Perhaps if there’s a busy part of the page, we dial that down. We test and make sure that people can use the page easily, can understand how to make transformations and can do some of the sophisticated things you can do in FRED.
Taylor: Also, then starting to integrate our other data products: Imagine looking at a FRED graph and having a policy paper that talks about that, or an ALFRED graph, all on the same page. You have a richer experience, a better understanding of economics, and it’s not just the data in isolation.
Fortova: There’s always a chance for improvement, so our plans are to devote time to looking at different search possibilities and seeing if we can provide users with a better experience: how to find series in FRED and, with that, how we can link our FRED products together.
Ideally, we would really like world dominance [laughs]. I don’t think people can really imagine their lives without cellphones. We would like them to not imagine their lives without FRED.
Originally published at https://www.stlouisfed.org in the printed edition of our annual report.
