March 2014:
The page says:
At times, the months and quarters of the business cycle turning points do not align. To learn more, see the FRED Blog post “Discrepancies in dating recessions.”
Nope.
Perhaps this:
https://fredblog.stlouisfed.org/2021/08/discrepancies-in-dating-recessions/
ps, I find that sort of information useful.
I catch myself lately noticing little improvements in the FRED graphing system. Little things, so that I'm not even sure there was a change. But I do notice them, and I do like what I see. My thanks to all at FRED.
I test things.
Quarterly debt data like TCMDO is given as "Quarterly, End-of Period". Debt data is always given as end-of-period, I think -- and I think this makes sense, even though I have to make up my own reasons that it might.
The quarterly series GDP, converted to annual values, appears to best match the annual series GDPA when GDP is aggregated using the "average" option, not End-of-Period. So this tells me that GDPA is figured from quarterly data by "average" and not by EOP. I am not surprised by this, as GDP is not debt data.
I pay attention to these things because it matters at least a little in the resulting graphs.
Now my complaint...
If I take a quarterly debt series and convert it to annual using EOP, everything is fine until I grab the "page short URL" for the graph and use that link to access the graph.
The problem is that the Edit Window (for the page-short-URL version) tells me the quarterly data was converted to annual using the "average" option when I know perfectly well that I used EOP.
I don't know if the Edit window is telling me the truth. Maybe the problem is only that the "aggregation method" field is not updated. Or maybe the problem is more complicated. Dunno.
Thanks for listening.
