About EconDISC

The Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis has been a leader in the compilation and provision of data to the research community as well as to the general public for well over four decades. EconDISC is the comprehensive assemblage of our data services, all of which are user-friendly, web-based collections of economic, financial, and banking data and documentation: FRED®, ALFRED®, FRASER®, CASSIDI®, and Liber8™. EconDISC offers the added convenience of searching all our databases simultaneously.

The origins of our data services

Former director of research at the St. Louis Fed, Homer Jones, was concerned by what he saw as a lack of rigorous data in economic research and commentary. He aimed to distribute data to increase the accuracy and relevance of economic research.¹ In 1961, he sent a memo to about 100 colleagues that included tables of various rates of change of the money supply, indicating that he "would be glad to hear from anyone who thinks such time series have value, concerning promising applications or interpretations."

Homer must have received significant positive feedback because, soon after, the St. Louis Fed began publishing its first statistical releases: U.S. Financial Data, Monetary Trends, National Economic Trends, and International Economic Trends, all of which continue to this date. A Business Week article published in 1967 noted that, "while most leading monetary economists don't buy [Homer's] theories, they eagerly subscribe to his numbers."² By the late 1980s, according to Beryl Sprinkel, a prominent business economist of the time, "weekly and monthly publications of the Research Department, which have now become standard references for everyone from undergraduates to White House officials, were initially Homer's products."

William Poole, president of the St. Louis Fed, has spoken to several audiences about the implications of Homer's work for monetary policy: "Legend has it that Homer viewed as an important part of his mission to provide the general public with timely information about the stance of monetary policy. In this sense he was an early proponent, perhaps the earliest proponent, of central bank accountability and transparency."³

This evolution continued in April 1991, when FRED, Federal Reserve Economic Data, was introduced as a dial-up electronic bulletin board. Local users gained access through a local phone call; everyone else incurred long-distance phone charges. Nevertheless, within the first month of service, usage was recorded from places as wide ranging as Taipei, London, and Vancouver. But FRED was still relatively small scale.

The current state of our data services

Today, our FRED database contains over 3000 series and receives about 60 million hits per year from over 125 countries. And our services have expanded greatly: We also provide vintage data (ALFRED), scanned images of historical publications and releases (FRASER), banking structure analysis (CASSIDI), and worldwide links (Liber8).

The St. Louis Fed is proud to continue our commitment to providing (and expanding) these data services. EconDISC serves as the gateway into that tradition of service. We hope you find our services useful and lucid.

Footnotes

1 Jones was a colleague of Milton Friedman at the University of Chicago. In fact, Friedman says that Jones introduced him to "rigorous economic theory" and "made economics exciting and relevant." (Quotations taken from Nobel Lectures, Economics 1969-1980, Assar Lindbeck, ed., World Scientific Publishing Co., Singapore, 1992.)

2 "Maverick in the Fed System," Business Week, November 18, 1967.

3 Poole, William. "Data, Data, and More Data." Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis Review, March/April 2007, 89(2).