FRED® and Friends at the St. Louis Fed
The Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis has been a pioneer in the distribution of economic information to the public, from the earliest mimeographed and hand-mailed data reports in 1961, to today's FRED and family suite of information sites. This commitment to universal data access and data literacy is built on the premise that a better-informed public helps maintain the stability of the financial system and the economy as a whole.
To see the broader history of the work of the St. Louis Fed, browse our Centennial Timeline.
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April 1991 | FRED® is Launched as a Dial-Up Bulletin Board Featuring Economic Data
The Research Department at the St. Louis Fed launched Federal Reserve Economic Data (FRED®), its free information service. In its earliest years, FRED was an electronic bulletin board of economic data that users could access via modems connected to personal computers.
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1995 | FRED Launches on the World Wide Web
FRED moves online with 865 data series. It's accessed about 6,000 times a week in its first year. 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.
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2002 | FRED2 Launches
The 2002 St Louis Fed annual report announces 8 million hits to the "new, enhanced version of FRED." Early versions allowed users to download all data in the database in a handful of compressed files. "FRED II" (aka "FRED2") ran concurrently with "FRED" until July 2003.
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2004 | FRED Users Can Download the Graphed Data in New Formats
For the first time, FRED offers data downloads in Microsoft Excel® and text file formats.
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February 2004 | User Data Lists Debut
FRED adds data list functionality to user accounts. Users can store lists of series, download series cross-tabulated by date, or save series pages. In November 2006, the data list feature was improved: lists could now include up to 1000 series and dates could now be added using one form.
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July 1, 2004 | FRASER Debuts
Digital library FRASER (then known formally as the Federal Reserve Archival System for Economic Research) launches as a home for the static data releases underpinning much of FRED's data.
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2005 | ALFRED® Goes Live
ALFRED (ArchivaL Federal Reserve Economic Data), the storehouse of data underneath FRED, goes live. ALFRED offers snapshots of data series at many points in the past, showing users what data looked like before later revisions.
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2007 | GeoFRED® Launches
The new mapping service GeoFRED allows users to create, customize, and share geographical maps of FRED data.
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March 2008 | Public Data Lists Debut
Data lists go live, allowing users to post curated collections of data from across FRED. The first public data list, posted March 2008, pulls together various U.S. currency exchange rate series.
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2008 | FRED Receives Over 50 Million Hits
The combined data services of FRED, ALFRED®, GeoFRED®, FRASER®, and CASSIDI® receive over 80 million hits. FRED alone has dedicated users in over 200 countries. These data tools are used in classrooms by students and teachers, cited by reporters, studied by researchers, referenced by librarians, and relied on by business analysts.
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March 2009 | The FRED API Is Released
The new FRED API (application programming interface) gives FRED using software developers access to the database functionality, allowing power users to bring FRED data into their own applications.
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November 2010 | FRED Graphing Capabilities Enhanced
Frequency aggregation is developed, allowing users the ability to aggregate data from a higher frequency to a lower frequency (e.g., from monthly data to annual data). FRED users also gain the ability to combine series and use scatter charts and pie charts.
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December 2010 | FRED Reaches 25,000 Series
FRED hits its 25,000 series milestone in late 2010, following the addition of more than 20,000 regional data series over the preceding year. That month, FRED also introduced the "International Data" category with more than 500 international labor series from the BLS, and just a few weeks later, the first collection of many Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) datasets was added to FRED.
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September 2011 | FRED Goes Mobile
The first FRED iPhone app is released, bringing 34,000 series to your pocket. An Android app follows a few months later, in January of 2012.
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November 2011 | Data Add-in for Microsoft Excel® Becomes Available
With the add-in, users are able to download the more than 40,000 economic data series in FRED directly into Excel. They can select data by the specific data series ID or from a list of FRED's most popular datasets.
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August 8, 2012 | FRED Reaches 50,000 Series
With the addition of harmonized EPI from Eurostat, FRED contains over 50,000 data series for the first time.
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July 25, 2013 | FRED Reaches 100,000 Series
FRED reaches (and surpasses) a cool 100,000 series with the addition of 58,000 Main Economic Indicators (MEI) series from the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) dataset.
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March 17, 2014 | User Dashboards Added
With the relaunch of user accounts, registered FRED users can now build a personal dashboard to track favorite series and graphs.
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March 24, 2014 | FRED Blog Debuts
The new FRED Blog debuts at fredblog.stlouisfed.org. The first post looks at U.S. currency in circulation.
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May-June 2016 | FRED Gets a Makeover and a New Address
Previews launch May 2016 and FRED moves to fred.stlouisfed.org in June. FRED also celebrates its 25th birthday this year.
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December 19, 2016 | FRED Interactives in Econlowdown Go Live
A new tool for economic education, FRED Interactives launch as self-paced and auto-graded online modules where users complete graph-building and graph-reading questions using live data from FRED. The experimental feature runs for 7 years and is retired in 2023.
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September 2017 | FRED Reaches 500,000 Series
FRED adds 38 new series from the Bank of International Settlements, bringing the total available series to more than half a million.
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January 2017 | FREDcast® Launched
The interactive forecasting game FREDcast® is released for use with FRED user accounts. Players forecast the value of four economic statistics: economic growth, price inflation, unemployment, and employment. Points are awarded for accuracy and players can compete in leagues with friends, coworkers, or classmates.
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April 2018 | FRED Partners with Census
FRED partners with the U.S. Census Bureau to provide users access to U.S. Census Bureau data through the FRED mobile app, allowing Census to retire its own mobile data apps.
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2018 | FRED Stars in the St. Louis Fed Annual Report
"Go Figure with FRED®" is the theme of the Bank's annual report. The issue features interviews with FRED staff, facts and figures on FRED's development, and testimonials from FRED users.
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April 2021 | Happy Birthday! FRED Turns 30 and ALFRED Turns 15
FRED and ALFRED both commemorate milestone birthdays with a visual redesign of FRED, new special anniversary logos, and even a limited-time online shop for FRED fans to buy FRED-branded gifts. By its 30th birthday on April 18, FRED contains over 788,000 US and international time series from 103 sources.
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August 2021 | Sunset of FREDCast
The FREDcast forecasting game is retired after five years to free up resources for new, innovative FRED features. Over its lifetime, FREDCast was used by more than 30,000 individuals, companies, teachers, and students, who made 500,000 predictions on key economic indicators. It played out in dozens of both intra-mural and extra-mural FREDCast league competitions in high schools and colleges.
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September 2022 | GeoFRED Map Functionality Becomes a Part of the Core FRED Site
After 15 years, the separate GeoFRED mapping website is retired to make way for streamlined map functionality on the FRED site. The new FRED map feature allows users to customize, share, and download geographical maps of data directly in FRED.
FRED® and Friends at the St. Louis Fed. https://fraser.stlouisfed.org/timeline/st-louis-fed-data, accessed on December 18, 2024.