FRED (Federal Reserve Economic Data)

FRED aggregates economic data published by dozens of government agencies and central banks, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the Bureau of Economic Analysis, the Federal Reserve itself, and international sources, into one searchable, freely downloadable archive. Series range from headline figures like real GDP and the unemployment rate down to far more granular data, regional home prices, specific industry production indexes, and money supply components, most going back decades and some over a century.

Use FRED to check a headline economic claim against the actual underlying series rather than a secondhand summary, since every series carries its own release schedule, revision history, and methodology notes that a summary can strip away. Many series come in both seasonally adjusted and non-adjusted versions, and picking the wrong one for a given comparison, for instance comparing a raw December retail sales figure to November without adjusting for holiday seasonality, produces a misleading read even when the raw numbers are accurate.

FRED is a data repository, not an analysis or forecasting tool. It presents the numbers exactly as published by the originating agency, with no interpretation of what a given move means for markets or the economy, so reading a chart without understanding the underlying methodology, for instance whether a series is nominal or inflation-adjusted, can produce a badly wrong conclusion. Some series are also revised well after their initial release, sometimes by a meaningful margin, so a chart pulled today can show materially different historical values for recent periods than the same chart would have shown when those periods were first reported. A series name that sounds similar to another, like the distinction between the headline CPI and the Fed's preferred core PCE, can also lead to comparing two genuinely different measures without realizing it.

Someone checking whether real GDP growth has actually slowed can pull the "Real Gross Domestic Product" series on FRED and see the reported quarterly annualized growth rate, say 2.1% for the most recent quarter against 2.8% the quarter before, directly from the source rather than trusting a paraphrased headline. Cross-referencing that against a related series, like the Sahm Rule recession indicator or initial jobless claims, in the same interface lets a reader build a fuller picture from primary data rather than any single figure in isolation.