Economics Guru is the companion data site for Alfie Meek’s Weekly Economic Update. Every chart is built directly from public data and updates itself as new numbers are released.
Using the site
- Find a chart. The All Charts page lists every chart on the site. Type a word — wage, rig count, delinquency — or use the search box at the top of any page.
- Change the time span. The buttons above the charts switch every chart on the page between 6 months and the full history.
- Show or hide a series. Click a name in a chart’s legend.
- Take it with you. Every chart downloads as a PNG image (dark or light background) or as a CSV of the underlying numbers.
- See what is new. The home page lists the most recent releases and the day each one arrived.
Refresh schedule
The site rebuilds at about 9:00 AM and 2:00 PM Eastern every weekday, plus one run each morning, weekends included. Most federal releases come out at 8:30 AM and are on the site by the 9:00 update. Releases that come out at 10:00 AM — home sales, JOLTS, consumer confidence, the ISM surveys — appear with the 2:00 PM update. Precious-metals prices update once a day, and the Georgia county pages about once a week.
The “Latest data” tag at the top of each page shows the most recent period on it. If one source is down, the rest of the site still updates and that page keeps its last good numbers. When a release is skipped or delayed — a federal shutdown, for example — a note appears above the charts it affects.
Data sources
The line under each chart names its exact source and series. Many federal series are pulled through the St. Louis Fed’s FRED database.
- U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics
- CPI and PPI; payrolls, wages and hours; unemployment and participation; JOLTS; productivity; county unemployment, employment and wages.
- U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis
- GDP and GDI, corporate profits, personal income and spending, the saving rate, the PCE price index, county per-capita income.
- U.S. Census Bureau
- Retail sales; factory and durable-goods orders and shipments; new home sales; permits, starts and completions; construction spending; county population, income, home values and rents.
- Federal Reserve Board
- Industrial production and capacity utilization, consumer credit, the Fed balance sheet, M2, Treasury yields, mortgage delinquency, the Distributional Financial Accounts.
- Federal Reserve Bank of New York
- Household Debt and Credit report; Economic Heterogeneity Indicators (spending and inflation by income group).
- U.S. Treasury
- Debt to the Penny; Monthly Treasury Statement outlays and receipts.
- U.S. Energy Information Administration
- Crude production, inventories, trade and refinery runs; the Strategic Petroleum Reserve; fuel prices; natural gas storage, production and LNG exports; electricity generation, sales and prices.
- The Conference Board
- Leading, Coincident and Lagging indexes; Consumer Confidence.
- University of Michigan
- Surveys of Consumers — consumer sentiment.
- Business surveys
- Institute for Supply Management (manufacturing and services); NFIB Small Business Economic Trends; Cass Freight Index; Challenger, Gray & Christmas job-cut report; Baker Hughes rig count.
- Housing industry
- National Association of Realtors (existing home sales, affordability); NAHB Housing Market Index; Mortgage Bankers Association weekly applications; Freddie Mac mortgage rates; S&P Cotality Case-Shiller home prices.
- Markets
- Yahoo Finance (stock indexes); CBOE (VIX); ICE BofA (corporate credit spreads); London fix via Kitco and MetalPriceAPI (gold, silver, platinum).
How a chart is built
Each series is pulled from its source, stored with its full available history, and drawn without smoothing unless the chart title says otherwise (a 3-month average, for example). For CPI and PPI, year-over-year rates use the not-seasonally-adjusted indexes, the way they are reported in the press, while monthly changes use seasonally adjusted data. Anything calculated here rather than published — ratios, spreads, contributions, trailing sums — is labelled as derived in the chart’s source line. Where a chart has gray bands, they mark NBER recessions.
A few private surveys have no public data feed. For those — ISM, NFIB, the Conference Board, NAHB, the MBA, Challenger — the history is kept on file and each new month is added from the publisher’s release.
Disclaimer
Charts and commentary are for information only. The data comes straight from the agencies and publishers named above and is not independently validated by Economics Guru; check the original source before making a decision that depends on a specific number.