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FRED® HelpWhat is FRED® ? If I have a question, who do I contact? What is the date format? What is ALFRED® and how do I retrieve Vintage Data? What are 'My Data Lists' and how do I use them? What formulas are used to calculate growth rates? What dates are used for the US recession bars in FRED® graphs? Other Topics What is FRED® ? FRED® is a database of over 14,000 U.S. economic time series (1,000 macro series and 13,000 regional series). With FRED®, you can download data in Microsoft Excel and text formats and view charts of data series. We plan to continually improve FRED® and encourage you to be a part of the development process by sending feedback through our contact form. If I have a question, who do I contact? If you have questions about the data in the FRED® database, the Research staff prefers that you send an email to stlsFRED@stls.frb.org. If your question necessitates a phone discussion, please call a Research staff member. Staff are available Monday through Friday, 8 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. CST.
Staff will respond to all email and telephone inquiries within one business day. What is the date format? All dates are represented as daily dates for consistency and ease of use. We chose a single date format that is widely supported by various spreadsheet applications (Excel, Lotus, etc.) and statistical software packages (SAS, Eviews, Stata, RATS, etc.). Many annual, quarterly, and monthly data series represent different times during the period (beginning of period, middle of period, etc.) so we chose to convert these frequencies to the first day of the period for consistency. The only exceptions are dates in the 8th District Banking Performance, Condition of Banks, and Federal Government Debt categories which are converted to the last day of the period. Dates for weekly and daily data series are natively daily dates and are not converted. Dates are formatted as YYYY-MM-DD. As an example, April 25, 2002 is represented as 2002-04-25. Examples of how dates are converted to daily dates:
What is ALFRED® and how do I retrieve Vintage Data? Using ALFRED - ArchivaL Federal Reserve Economic Data - you can retrieve a data series as it existed on a specific date in history. Vintage data can be downloaded directly from the ALFRED website or by using 'My Data Lists.' Please see ALFRED Help for information about ALFRED and how to download data directly from the ALFRED website, and the How to Use 'My Data Lists' tutorial. What are 'My Data Lists' and how do I use them? With a user account, you can store lists of economic data series. Data lists can be used to download series cross-tabulated by date or save links to series pages. See 'How to Use My Data Lists' for a step-by-step tutorial with screenshots. What formulas are used to calculate growth rates? The following formulas are used:Change x(t) - x(t-1) Change from Year Ago x(t) - x(t-n_obs_per_yr) Percent Change ((x(t)/x(t-1)) - 1) * 100 Percent Change from Year Ago ((x(t)/x(t-n_obs_per_yr)) - 1) * 100 Compounded Annual Rate of Change (((x(t)/x(t-1)) ** (n_obs_per_yr)) - 1) * 100 Continuously Compounded Rate of Change (ln(x(t)) - ln(x(t-1))) * 100 Continuously Compounded Annual Rate of Change ((ln(x(t)) - ln(x(t-1))) * 100) * n_obs_per_yr Natural Log ln(x(t)) Notes: 'x(t)' is the value of series x at time period t. 'n_obs_per_yr' is the number of observations per year. The number of observations per year differs by frequency: Daily, 260 (no values on weekends) Annual, 1 Monthly, 12 Quarterly, 4 Bi-Weekly, 26 Weekly,52 'ln' represents the natural logarithm. '**' represents to the power of. What dates are used for the US recession bars in FRED® graphs? The NBER recession data is available at http://www.nber.org/cycles.html. The monthly dates for the peaks and troughs are represented as daily dates in the charts as:Peak, Trough 1857-06-01, 1858-12-01 1860-10-01, 1861-06-01 1865-04-01, 1867-12-01 1869-06-01, 1870-12-01 1873-10-01, 1879-03-01 1882-03-01, 1885-05-01 1887-03-01, 1888-04-01 1890-07-01, 1891-05-01 1893-01-01, 1894-06-01 1895-12-01, 1897-06-01 1899-06-01, 1900-12-01 1902-09-01, 1904-08-01 1907-05-01, 1908-06-01 1910-01-01, 1912-01-01 1913-01-01, 1914-12-01 1918-08-01, 1919-03-01 1920-01-01, 1921-07-01 1923-05-01, 1924-07-01 1926-10-01, 1927-11-01 1929-08-01, 1933-03-01 1937-05-01, 1938-06-01 1945-02-01, 1945-10-01 1948-11-01, 1949-10-01 1953-07-01, 1954-05-01 1957-08-01, 1958-04-01 1960-04-01, 1961-02-01 1969-12-01, 1970-11-01 1973-11-01, 1975-03-01 1980-01-01, 1980-07-01 1981-07-01, 1982-11-01 1990-07-01, 1991-03-01 2001-03-01, 2001-11-01 Other Topics The "Updated" date associated with each series is the most recent date that a series was updated in FRED®. This date does not necessarily correspond to the dates of observations. For detailed definitions and methodology beyond that provided in the "Notes" with each series in FRED®, we recommend referring to the source of the data. The inflation rate is typically calculated as the percent rate of change between two observations of the Consumer Price Index (typically from month to month or from the same month one year ago). Conventions used in our publications for calculating rates of change are available in the Tables of Contents of our Monetary Trends and our National Economic Trends publications. Information on money stock measures, the monetary base and reserves, retail and deposit sweeps programs, and the monetary services index can be found in the Monetary Aggregates section of our website. Also included are historical data, references to further reading, and several datasets which are not included in the FRED® database.
FRASER® is a collection of historical documents. Some historical statistics that are
not available in FRED® may be found in FRASER®.
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