May 2016:
March 2014:

Thursday, June 30, 2016

Here's a thought

At FRED for some reason they provide Household Debt Service Payments as a Percent of Disposable Personal Income, but they don't provide Household Debt Service Payments in Billions of Dollars.


Almost always (in my experience) when they offer a ratio series, they also offer the components of the ratio separately. So this would be the exception that proves the rule wrong.

I can make an assumption. I can assume that they used the DPI series when they figured the ratio. I'm pretty confident in that. And I can use DPI along with the Household DSP as a Percent of DPI series to get DSP in billions. It works for me.

It's early in the morning, though, and I have to be careful with the calculation or I'll screw it up. To get the FRED series DSP as a percent of DPI, they take the DSP/DPI ratio and multiply it by 100. Working backwards, I can take the data they give me, multiply it by DPI, and divide it by 100. It's not complicated: It's just backwards from figuring a percent. But that's what screws me up -- it's backwards.

Anyway, unless I had a massive brain fart, it looks like this:

Graph #1: Screen Capture of FRED Graph

Here's my thought. FRED could give users the option to revise the title of a graph they create, like this:

Graph #2: Edited Title

Sometimes, at least, revised titles would be appropriate.

1 comment:

The Arthurian said...

More boldly, FRED could include the user-defined graph name on the graph source page.