Provides clean, tidy access to economic data from the 'Federal Reserve Economic Data' ('FRED') API https://fred.stlouisfed.org/docs/api/fred/. 'FRED' is maintained by the 'Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis' and contains over 800,000 time series from 118 sources covering GDP, employment, inflation, interest rates, trade, and more. Dedicated functions fetch series observations, search for series, browse categories, releases, and tags, and retrieve series metadata. Multiple series can be fetched in a single call, in long or wide format. Server-side unit transformations (percent change, log, etc.) and frequency aggregation are supported, with readable transform aliases such as 'yoy_pct' and 'log_diff'. Real-time and vintage helpers (built on 'ALFRED') return a series as it appeared on a given date, the first-release version, every revision, or a panel of selected vintages. An offline curated catalogue of around fifty popular series, NBER recession reference dates, and FOMC meeting dates support discoverability and event-study workflows. Default 'plot' method shades NBER recession periods. Reproducibility helpers produce BibTeX or plain-text citations and YAML manifests with per-object hashes. Data is cached locally for subsequent calls. This product uses the 'FRED' API but is not endorsed or certified by the 'Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis'.
Author
Maintainer: Charles Coverdale charles.f.coverdale@gmail.com