Attention Econ Nerds: FRED Has Updated Its Graphing Capability

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There are still a few bugs in the system, and you lose some control over presentation when you directly embed their code, but the fine folks at Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis have added a few snazzy little features to their FRED graphing program. You can see what it looks like in the example below, which shows GDP per capita since 2004—and illustrates just how long it’s taken us merely to get back to the level of 2007. The timeline control at the bottom is new: if you want to see this data for any other decade, or for multiple decades, just drag the year markers. The y-axis gets a little wonky when you do this, but this is just a beta version, so a few bugs are to be expected.

At the moment, unfortunately, the embedding function seems to be working sort of sporadically. If you see “Proxy Error” instead of a graph, click refresh and try again. Then try yet again. Like healthcare.gov, I’m sure it will work reliably soon enough.

This has been your stats nerd update for the day.

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