Keith Taylor is an assistant vice president at the St. Louis Fed and is considered to be the father of modern Fred (Federal Reserve Economic Data). Fans post about him on social media. Swag bears his name. College professors dedicate class sessions and textbook sections to him. Meet Fred, a 33-year-old data tool that has become the economics world’s most unlikely celebrity. — The New York Times
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, 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, Tennessee.
That appeal crosses political lines. Larry Kudlow, who directed the National Economic Council during the first Trump administration, has tweeted and retweeted Fred charts. Groups as disparate as the spending-focused Alaskans for a Sustainable Budget and the pro-worker advocacy organisation Employ America have used its charts to back up their arguments. It is even occasionally used by professional and White House economists, who tend to have access to sophisticated data tools, for quick charts.
“It is unfathomable for me now, to think of the days before Fred,” said Ernie Tedeschi, the director of economics at the Budget Lab at Yale and a former chief economist at the White House Council of Economic Advisers.
When he speaks to foreign government economists, he noted, they are often “jealous” of the data tool, which is more comprehensive and easier to use than what other countries offer.
“It’s a compliment to Fred,” he said.
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.
The story started in the 1960s, with an economist named Homer Jones (now sometimes referred to as the “grandfather of Fred”). Jones was the director of research at the Fed’s branch in St. Louis, and he wanted to make central bank decisions more data-based, so he started to mail typed data reports to Fed officials around the country.
By the 1970s, the publication had become formal and had 35,000 subscribers. And in 1991, Fred officially started as a dial-in line that users could call to hear statistics. By 1993, it offered over 300 data series, and by the end of 1995, it had made the leap to the web.
Then came the 2000s, and with them two big changes: The punishing recession that started in 2007 put a spotlight on the economy and the Fed, and years of rapid improvement in technology meant that it was suddenly possible to substantially scale up what Fred offered.
“Starting in 2010, 2011, we started to add a lot more data,” said Keith Taylor, the man who is essentially the father of modern Fred. Taylor, whose official job description states that he is “responsible for Fred and family”, said he was “just excited about the possibility” of offering more data to the public.
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.
“The Sahm Rule was built on Fred data,” Sahm said, calling the website a “national treasure”. These days, her rule, now popular, is also available on the interface.
“I was over the moon when it went on Fred,” she said. “Not only did it go on Fred, but I got a T-shirt.”
Those T-shirts are, in fact, a hot commodity.
The St. Louis Fed began to produce Fred swag just for internal and promotional purposes. (This included a branded lab coat that Fed employees would wear to presentations, because they’re “data scientists” – get it?)
People would snap up the items. Eventually, the demand was high enough that the St. Louis Fed began to sell them. It even temporarily offered them online in 2021 to commemorate Fred’s 30th birthday, though they are now available to the public only through the St. Louis Fed’s gift shop.
“We do sell out,” Taylor said, explaining that the Fed does not turn a profit on the products. The research department occasionally votes on tag lines for the backs of the shirts. A particularly popular one was “keeping it real, unless it’s nominal” (“real” being economic shorthand for data that is adjusted for inflation).
“It’s not bad for the dismal science,” said Diego Mendez-Carbajo, who does education and outreach around Fred, using a common nickname for the field of economics.
James Bullard, a former president of the St. Louis Fed and the proud owner of a Fred hoodie, said that when he would go to official events as the leader of the reserve bank, the data tool’s reputation often preceded him.
“The St. Louis Fed is well known, and a lot of it was Fred,” he said, both in the United States and abroad.
In fact, about 40% of Fred’s user base comes from overseas, with people in financial centres around the world – Seoul, South Korea; Mumbai, India; London – using the tool extensively.
The question is what comes next. As his fellow peak millennials sprout the occasional gray hair and notice that their hangovers don’t fade quite as quickly as they once did, Fred has also been showing signs of maturity: The St. Louis Fed has added data slowly in recent years.
But Fred could change in 2025. Improvements are coming for the interface, including the ability for users to change the visual appearance of their graphs so that lines pop more vividly.
And the Fed expects to roll out a new partnership with the Census Bureau, one that will improve the pipeline through which data ends up on Fred. The change will tweak how data gets onto Fred, with a goal of speeding up the process. If things work out as hoped, even more data releases could soon upload within five minutes.
And while that’s not fast enough for traders looking for near-instant information, it would make the tool valuable for the armchair economists, at-home stock traders and students who make up Fred’s fan base.
“It’s a remarkable tool, it’s free and it’s available 24/7, 365,” said Kim Schoenholtz, a New York University professor emeritus and the author of a textbook that has, for about a decade, included economic and finance exercises that use Fred.
“It’s a public good,” he said. “Arguably, the greatest public good the Fed has ever supplied.” – ©2024 The New York Times Company
