AlFRED Developments Bob Rasche Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis October 2008

AlFRED Inventory Currently 19,747 Series –Recent Additions Greenbook Projections (21) starting in 01/78 CPI series (2) Real Potential GDP starting 01/91 Missing Data Policy (incomplete vintages) e.g. All items CPI SA

AlFRED Activity Jan-Sept 2008 = 5.44 million hits Jan-Sept 2007 = 1.88 million hits

AlFRED Initiatives H.3 Statistical Release data (will complete backfilling of FRED categories) Annual Data (as in Economic Report of the President) International Data from BLS – Stock/Watson Data set –“Bayesian VARs with Large Panels”, Marta Banbura, Universite Libre de Bruxelles, ECARES, Domenico Giannone, European Central Bank, ECARES and CEPR,Lucrezia Reichlin, European Central Bank, ECARES and CEPR Regional Data (time series and cross sections)

AlFRED Enhancements Data Transformations Verticals vs. Diagonals

AlFRED Enhancements Coming Soon: Web Services FRED API

FRED API The St. Louis Fed has created APIs (application programming interfaces) to allow developers to write programs and build applications that interact with content on its websites.application programming interfaces FRED® API - Users may query our Federal Reserve Economic Data (FRED®) and Archival Federal Reserve Economic Data (ALFRED®) databases to retrieve the specific data desired (according to source, release, category and series among other preferences).FRED® API Federal Reserve Economic Data (FRED®)Archival Federal Reserve Economic Data (ALFRED®)

FRED API Our API accommodates any programming language that can parse XML and communicate with our servers using HTTP.XMLHTTP XML was designed for programs to parse and follows a strict structure unlike much HTML. XML allows custom tags and relationships among tags.

Example Download last two vintages for series INDPRO, US Industrial Production Index. Include on a browser: – realtime_start= &observation_start= &output_type=2&file_type=xls& api_key= b c2032d949b51b793

AlFRED Enhancements Future Developments (your priorities please!) –Sample specific data downloads (will be available with Web Services) –Vintage Specific Excel Tabs –Cross-Section vintages –Panel vintages