Federal Reserve Economic Data

FRED turns 25 today! The popular data tool has now been available for a quarter century. From a bulletin board service with a single phone line, it evolved into a major website with API, mobile apps, and related websites. It is used in statistical software and major economics textbooks. Don a party hat and learn a few things about FRED’s history!

• FRED stands for Federal Reserve Economic Data, even though it contains much more than Federal Reserve data.
• USFD announced FRED’s arrival on the cover of its April 18, 1991, edition.
• FRED started as a dial-up electronic bulletin board (as noted above).
• The phone number for FRED was 314-621-18xx, which is now a working number for a local produce company in St. Louis.
• In the first two months of its existence, FRED had 620 users!
• In December 1991, there were over 3,000 calls to FRED.
• Since the beginning, FRED has been updated every business day.
• FRED has always been international: Within the first two months of 1991, calls came from Taipei, London, and Vancouver. Now pretty much the whole world can get to FRED. In 2015, 194 of 197 countries accessed FRED, plus many territories and country equivalents. (We noticed the list did not include North Korea.)
• FRED has a long history of adding data to improve the customer experience. FRED started with USFD in April. By August 1991, the data from our publication Monetary Trends were added. By October 1991, the data from our National Economic Trends were also added.
• FRED has been free since day one.
• The FRED trademark was initially held by the Minneapolis Fed; they let us have it because they were no longer using it.
• By 1993, FRED had over 300 series.
• Currently, FRED has over 384,000 series.
• FRED added ALFRED in July 2006, with ALFRED graphing features added in April 2008.
• GEOFRED was born in 2007.
• In 2004, FRED started the year with just over 1,000 series and ended the year with 3,000 series.
• In 1995, FRED moved to the world wide web. If employees wanted to use it, they could go to the computer terminal in the Office of Computing Services.
• FRED’s first web address was http://www.stls.frb.org/fred/.
• FRED then moved to http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred in 2002, and then became http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2 following a major redesign.
• The oldest observation in FRED is from 1785 (brick production for England and Wales, Great Britain).
• The Census Bureau is the largest source of data series in FRED: It contributes 121,069 series.
• Which of these news organizations does not use FRED in their publication? New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, or National Enquirer? [Answer: We believe the National Enquirer does not use FRED.]
• How many observations are in FRED? 48,156,490, with 129,123,230 in ALFRED.
• Most observations in a single series? USRECDP—a daily recession indicator—has 58,397 separate observations.
• How many countries’ data are in FRED? 242 countries (or country equivalents, for reporting purposes to organizations like the World Bank and IMF).

For more about the history of FRED, including some pictures of the old websites, see this Review article. And thanks to the Internet Archive Wayback Machine, you can see how the FRED website looked in 1996, 1999, 2001, 2002, 2005, and 2011.

Suggested by Katrina Stierholz.