Electronic Resources

Federal Reserve Economic Data (FRED)

With the U.S. economy increasingly becoming a topic of interest, more and more individuals and organizations are finding that up-to-date financial and economic data are critical to their success. Through the FRED database, the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis provides consumers, students, economists and financial institutions around the world with economic and financial information in an easy-to-use format.

What is on FRED: FRED provides historical U.S. economic and financial data, including daily U.S. interest rates, monetary and business indicators, exchange rates, balance of payments and regional economic data for Arkansas, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky,Mississippi, Missouri and Tennessee.

The FRED data files are grouped into 12 categories. All files, except those that are compressed, are in ASCII format. Compressed files are in .zip or self-extracting .exe formats. The compressed files contain all of the ASCII files within that category of data.

There are update files for most of the historical series on the FRED data base. Select "Update file" from any category to display the index of update files. These files contain the last few observations for each series. They should be used if you want to display the last couple of observations or if you plan to maintain a mini-database and don't want to download the entire series each time there is an update.

Holdings: Beginning of data series to present.