Accessing US Macroeconomic Time Series Through FRED

Summary

The question asks whether regional central banks provide programmatic access to their statistical data, after the author encountered CSV downloads and web scraping. The response points to the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis’s FRED service as a widely used source for US macroeconomic time series and notes that it offers an API.

This is a concise pointer to a data source rather than a discussion of data retrieval methods. It gives no examples of API requests, coverage details, update frequencies, licensing terms, or comparison with the European Central Bank and other regional central banks mentioned in the question. Researchers should therefore treat it as an introduction to FRED, not as a comprehensive guide to central-bank data access.

Key ideas

• FRED provides access to a broad collection of US macroeconomic time series.
• The service offers an API for programmatic retrieval of data.
• The response identifies a useful source but does not explain access methods or cover other central banks.

Tags

# Do Regional Central Banks have API's?


# Do Regional Central Banks have API's?












Do Regional Central Banks such as the Federal Reserve and ECB have API's to access their Statistics? I've been searching all day and haven't been able to find them. They seem to provide most of their data in CSV Files or one has to carry out some web-scraping.

Thank You

## Answer by blueskiess (score 2)

https://quant.stackexchange.com/a/18306

The Federal Reserve bank of St Louis has a widely used and popular application called FRED http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/ which is a fairly rich data source for US macro time series data considering that it's freely available! Check out their API https://api.stlouisfed.org for more info.

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