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Federal Reserve Bank API (stlouisfed.org)
78 points by powertower on Oct 2, 2011 | hide | past | favorite | 18 comments



At datamarket.com we have put all of this data into our system, see http://datamarket.com/data/list/?q=provider:225 which makes visualisation a snap.


The missing documentation:

/savers/delete -- suppress interest rates to ruin savings (aliases: /banks/addcash, /stocks/pumpup )

/banks/bailout -- returns the "banker bonus" object

/fed/audit -- 404


Why so much hate? Better access to data is generally a good thing. You could use it to build a proper argument on a political level, instead of resorting to this kind of snarkiness.


i detected no hate. only humor. and a bit of sting that usually comes from a kernal of truth.


Agreed.

Sometimes on HN we get a blog post announcing a new library, or cool hack, or something like that. When that happens, I usually crawl the author's about page and online presence.

I'm looking for embarrassing details that are unrelated to the post being discussed. Then, I usually leave a comment on HN to the effect of "man, this guy's fat and probably has never been touched by a woman."

No hate, only humor. It might sting but it's probably true also. Who cares if it's an irrelevant non-contribution?


I laughed ;)


rocks - in R, just

  library(quantmod)
  getSymbols("CPIAUCNS", src="FRED")
then you can get nice graphs with something like

  library(ggplot2)
  CPIPCT = data.frame(CPIAUCNS / lag(CPIAUCNS,12) * 100 -100)
  CPIPCT$date= as.Date(rownames(CPIPCT))
  CPIPCT <- tail(CPIPCT, 240)
  CPI.m <- melt(CPIPCT, id = 'date')
  ggplot(data=CPI.m, aes(x=date, y=value, colour=variable)) + ylab("YoY % Change") + theme_bw() + scale_x_date("")  + geom_line(size=1.4) + opts(plot.background = theme_rect(colour = 'black', fill = '#CCCCEE', size = 1, linetype='solid'), legend.position="top") + scale_colour_manual("CPI", breaks=c("CPIAUCNS"), values = c("#0000CC"), labels=c('All Urban'))
or just get the graphs online with Fred Graph -

http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/graph/


Do you have any recommendations for accessible R tutorials? I would love to get into this a little bit more. R seems quite effective for these kinds of things.



meant to post this one - R for Programmers -

http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/~matloff/R/RProg.pdf


Not a tutorial, but I found the R Graph gallery helpful. When I first got started I typically just poked around for something interesting, downloaded the source and started tweaking parameters and/or loading in new data sets. It can be daunting to create graphs from scratch in R without experience - I found these provided some good training wheels.

http://addictedtor.free.fr/graphiques/


I'm looking forward to the next version when they release the API to access the discount window.


Hello $money.


More specifically this is an API to FRED (Federal Reserve Economic Data).

Many (most?) of the graphs you seen on econ blogs/columns/news articles, even popular ones, are generated using FRED.


Alex Jones mentions New York, then Kansas as the two biggest Fed posts: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t1Tn61Y0Cfw&feature=playe...


Where is documentation for withdraw method?

    GET /withdraw/{amount}/{currency}


Try logging in with Bank of America's credentials. Also use a lot of headers so that your HTTP request is too big to fail.


This is a gold mine




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