Nod to the St. Louis Fed: NIPA tables now on FRED

This is news worth sharing for all those policy wonks out there. The St. Louis Fed has added over 10,000 new data series from the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) National Income and Product Account tables to its excellent FRED database and research tool. FRED now counts over 70,000 series of data.

The addition of these new series means the days of cutting and pasting NIPA data from the BEA website unto an Excel worksheet to create charts are over. (As everyone now knows, using Excel worksheet to handle data can be risky business...)

Also, since I'm on the topic of FRED, I'll also mention that the St. Louis Fed added earlier this year data for US federal deficits and surpluses as a percent of GDP. This saves us the extra step of calculating the fraction of GDP every time we produce charts of the US government's fiscal position.

To those who don't use FRED, I should mention that it offers a very simple research tool for data analysis and for creating charts that are useful for socio-economic and financial analysis. I highly recommend it. It's free (although I seem to recall you must register).