Federal Reserve Economic Data

The FRED® Blog

The new St. Louis Fed Macro Snapshot

The Macro Snapshot was discontinued in 2024, but this post looks at the intentions behind its creation and development and includes references to current tools in FRED.

People who work with economic data are familiar with the most popular indicators in FRED—the unemployment rate, GDP, interest rates, etc. But FRED contains close to a million data series, each of which can be modified and presented in various ways. Given the sheer size and scope of FRED, it can be difficult to know which other series you should focus on if you want to better understand the current economy. You may ask yourself, “Well, what do economists and policymakers look at—and how do they think about those indicators?”

The St. Louis Fed’s new Macro Snapshot answers these and other questions. The Macro Snapshot is a new portal to the FRED dataverse. It compiles into a single interactive dashboard important economic indicators from FRED—the indicators economists and policymakers at the St. Louis Fed follow when analyzing the current economy.

Graphs on the Macro Snapshot often link to their FRED series and blog posts, where users can learn more about the macroeconomic importance of a given indicator. Indicators are also broken down by topic, allowing users to easily explore and categorize the Macro Snapshot’s select list of series.

The image above shows the top of one Macro Snapshot page, with the following features:

  1. Pages categorizing series by topic.
  2. FRED-style buttons and ranges to adjust graphed time periods.
  3. Graph elements that give additional context to FRED series.
  4. The ability to hover over points to see corresponding dates and values.
  5. The ability to click series on and off using legends.
  6. Captions that explain aspects of the graph, cite data sources, and link to FRED (and other resources as necessary) for more in-depth descriptions.

The data on the Macro Snapshot are updated directly from FRED using its public API, which lets its underlying code pull FRED data automatically. Its content will change as economic conditions evolve or new data are added to FRED. While it does not and cannot contain everything sufficient for understanding the economy or making policy, it is a useful window into the current perspective of economists and policymakers at the St. Louis Fed—and a valuable curation of FRED’s ever-expanding data offerings.

Suggested by Charles Gascon and Devin Werner.

Revisions and updates to CPI data

Recalculating seasonal adjustment factors and expenditure weights

The FRED Blog has used ALFRED graphs to discuss the regular revisions to employment data and the periodic updates to real gross domestic product data. Here, once again, we tap into ALFRED to discuss revisions and updates to consumer price index (CPI) data.

The bars in the ALFRED graph above show the annual CPI inflation rates between 2018 and 2021 using two different vintages of CPI data: before (in red) and after (in blue) the January 2022 revision and update to the CPI data. The differences in annual inflation rates are minimal, so what is involved in those revisions and updates?

The revisions are conducted every year and involve adjusting many of the 80,000 individual prices recorded every month for changes in their seasonal patterns. For example, fresh fruit prices are lower during harvest on account of the bountiful supply available. The BLS considers these price swings and reports seasonally adjusted price indexes. However, the seasonal changes in prices can be as fickle as the seasonal weather and the corresponding adjustment factors used by the BLS require regular evaluation.

The updates are conducted every two years and involve adjusting the relative weights of goods and services purchased across eight different categories of consumer spending. For example, over the past two years of COVID-19-induced disruptions to regular life, consumers shifted their food purchases away from restaurants towards groceries. The BLS considers those changed patterns by introducing new spending weights in its market basket for goods and services.

Some research shows the impact large-scale and less-frequent revisions and updates to CPI data have on the accurate calculation of consumer price inflation. In that light, the small differences in annual inflation rates across data vintages reflected in the ALFRED graph are a testament to the value of more frequent and smaller-scale updates to CPI data. More accurate data facilitates better decision making, even if the reported inflation rates do not change much.

How this graph was created: Search ALFRED for “Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers: All Items in U.S. City Average.” By default, ALFRED shows a graph with two sets of bars: the most recent vintage and the prior vintage. Add additional vintages by using the “Add Line” tab and select the date of the desired vintage from the “or select a vintage” dropdown menu. Change the start date and the end date above the graph to customize the number of data points shown.

Suggested by Diego Mendez-Carbajo.

Gaslighting gas prices

What's behind the recent surge of prices at the pump?

The Russian invasion of Ukraine has amplified concerns about the price of gasoline. And for good reason: In March, prices at the pump surged over $4 per gallon for the first time since July 2008. This increase is more than 50% above prices in March 2021, which were about $2.80 per gallon. Gas at $4 per gallon sounds scary, but are real gas prices really that high?

By real prices, we mean prices that take overall inflation into account. To investigate, we compare nominal gas prices (the price you pay at the pump) to real gas prices, which we compute by dividing the nominal price by the consumer price index (CPI) and multiplying by 127.5, the value of the CPI in January 1990. By doing this, we normalize the gas price to the value of the dollar in January 1990, allowing us to compare gas prices across time and account for overall inflation.

The FRED graph above shows the result: Real gas prices have indeed increased in the past few months; however, they have only recently reached their pre-pandemic level. While nominal gas prices have increased rapidly over the past few months, real gas prices were still lower than they were for most of the 2006-2014 period. In fact, today’s real prices are within one standard deviation of the mean over the past 15 years.

These normalized, real gas prices have remained relatively flat over the past 5 years, which tells us that the high nominal prices are substantially driven by high inflation. Now we understand that an essential driver of the long-run increase in the price at the pump is inflationary pressures.

How this graph was created: Search FRED for “gas price,” then from its graph click on “edit graph”, under “customize data,” and apply formula (127.5*a)/(b). Then open the “add line” tab and search for the gas price again.

Suggested by Julian Kozlowski and Sam Jordan-Wood.



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