A Work-Around

Here's a work-around for the FRED problem described in the previous post. I took the graph just as FRED gave it to me (i.e., the previous post's image) and exported the link. Then I opened a new blank tab in my browser and pasted the link into the URL box. I got the same wrong graph. But this time, the "a" and "b" boxes both said Change, Billions of Dollars. And this time, when I changed the "b" units to Billions of Dollars, it took. Then, of course, I had to export the link again to get the graph I really wanted.

Unreliable

You can see right away that the red line on the graph is spastic. That's because it's a ratio of "change in" values. And the right-hand scale shows it. The units are Change, Billions of Dollars divided by Change, Billions of dollars.

However...

 

... See the white box at the bottom of the image? The one labeled "EDIT DATA SERIES 2..."

About in the middle of that box are the red letters "a" and "b" in parentheses. These are the two sets of data that I used to create the red line on the graph. The one labeled "a" correctly shows Change, Billions of Dollars as the units I want to use. The one labeled "b" correctly shows Billions of Dollars as the units I want.

But the graph doesn't show what I want. I want Change in Billions, divided by Billions. What the graph shows is Change in Billions, divided by Change in Billions.

This problem never came up before they "improved" FRED.