The New York Times [gift article] – “From Facebook political debates to college classrooms, the St. Louis Fed’s data tool has gained a major following. Fans post about him on social media. Swag bearing his name sells out on the regular. College professors dedicate class sessions and textbook sections to him. Foreign government officials have been known to express jealousy over his skills, and one prominent economist refers to him as a “national treasure.” Meet FRED, a 33-year-old data tool from St. Louis, Mo., and the economics world’s most unlikely celebrity. Even if you have not interacted with FRED yourself, there is a good chance you’ve encountered him without knowing it. The tool’s signature baby blue graphs dot social media and crop up on many of the world’s most popular news websites. (Paul Krugman, an opinion writer for The New York Times, has referred to FRED as “my friend.”) Many people feel that way about FRED. The website had nearly 15 million users last year, and it is on track for even more in 2024, up from fewer than 400,000 as recently as 2009. Their reasons for clicking are diverse: FRED users are coming for freshly released unemployment data, to check in on egg inflation or to find out whether business is booming in Memphis…FRED — whose name stands for Federal Reserve Economic Data — was born in 1991. But he was a sparkle in the eye of the St. Louis Fed long before that…

These days, FRED offers 825,000 data series — everything from the youth unemployment rate in Nepal to price trends for chocolate chip cookies in America. Even professional economists with access to complex and expensive data tools — like Haver Analytics or a Bloomberg terminal — use FRED to pull data quickly and easily. They include Claudia Sahm, an economist who came up with a famous rule of thumb that points out that a jump in the unemployment rate tends to herald an economic recession…”