The Most Amazing Economics Website In The World Just Got So Much Better
If you read Business Insider at all, then you definitely come across charts from FRED, a website run out of the St. Louis Federal Reserve, which lets you chart tens of thousands of economic data series, like the CPI, initial jobless claims GDP (and many sub-indicators), and Non-Farm Payrolls (including detailed data on lots of industries). We profiled the site and the people behind the site early last year.
Not only is there tons of data, but it's also interactive, so you can chart one indicator against another, or quickly go from a chart that shows annual percentage changes to one that shows a sequential percentage change.
FRED is so good, that it makes you depressed to go to other sites where public data is presented.
The ECB, for example, is a complete horror show. Check it out here and then get really depressed.
But the good news is that FRED itself keeps getting better, and adding more data, which is in a way better than other sites becoming FRED-like, since then everything's all together.
And FRED took a huge step in that direction last week with the addition of a bunch of data from the OECD:
FRED grows to more than 140,000 data series with addition of OECD Main Economic Indicators
The addition of 58,000 Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) Main Economic Indicators (MEI) series will nearly double the size of the FRED database. The addition includes detailed economic data on the 34 OECD-member nations plus Brazil, China, India, Indonesia, the Russian Federation and South Africa.
This significant expansion goes beyond headline figures such as GDP, unemployment, CPI and retail trade volume, thus providing users with the means to analyze the OECD-member and selected non-member economies with more detail and precision.
These new series include, but are not limited to, extensive balance-of-payments data; government securities rates; and granular employment data by age, status and gender. Additional series of interest measure such things as monetary aggregates; compensation on an hourly, monthly and weekly basis; and business opinions on the current economic environment.
So that's why we have the chart above, Japanese CPI, which is not something we were easily able to chart before.