FRED, fully used: the curated catalogue
Bundles: macro/global/fred/*. Code: compute/fred_catalogue.py and publish/fred_catalogue.py; step fred_catalogue.
Source
- The Data bank’s
fred_series_catalogholds 383 series, one row per series: title, units, frequency, theme, FRED’s copyright tag, any third-party holder, a publish policy and the citation FRED asks for. - The series were chosen from FRED’s own release, series and tag listings, ranked by popularity and then checked;
docs/FRED_SOURCES.mdin the Data bank has the full list. - Observations come from
fred_series, latest vintage per date.
Licence
The licence rule is applied from the catalogue, never decided here:
| Publish policy | Series | What is published |
|---|---|---|
publish_with_citation | 348: public domain, or “copyright, citation required” | Levels, with each series’ citation in meta.series |
derived_only | 34: ICE BofA, Moody’s, Cboe, S&P/Case-Shiller, Dow Jones, Nasdaq, University of Michigan, NAR, ADP, Freddie Mac | Only the trailing five-year percentile and the change over 13 weeks (or 3 months). Neither recovers a level without a starting value |
Discontinued or internal_only | 1 | Nothing |
- Freddie Mac is treated as derived-only although FRED asks only for a citation. That was a conservative call in the Data bank’s curation file and can be relaxed there.
- Check: on 2026-10-02 no derived-only series id appeared as a column in any published bundle on the site.
Layout
- One bundle family per theme and frequency:
- US rates and curve, policy rates, Fed balance sheet, credit, bank lending, financial conditions
- labour, inflation, activity, GDP and fiscal, money
- dollar and FX, trade, commodities
- OECD and BIS series for other economies, and India
- Daily series appear as each week’s last value from 2000. Weekly series start in 2000; monthly and quarterly series show their full history.
- A family over the 150 KB budget is split into numbered parts (
_part1,_part2, …) by column.
Limits (from the Data bank’s curation)
- FRED cut ICE BofA history back to three years in April 2026.
- S&P 500, Dow Jones and Nasdaq carry ten years.
- FRED’s OECD India CPI feed stops in March 2025. Use MoSPI.