Talk it up

At FRED Blog: The evolution of employment costs in the private and public sectors. They show "wages and salaries" for public- and private-sector workers --

and they say

The graph above tells us that wages and salaries have increased faster in the private sector. But, as both series are normalized to 100 in 2007, we can’t say whether wages had been better in the public sector and the private sector is just now catching up.

I take their graph, change the units to "Percent Change from Year Ago" --

and I wonder why they are talking about increase.

//

They show "benefits" for public- and private-sector workers --

and they say

Again, this graph says nothing about the levels. However, the two graphs in combination do tell us something: Relatively speaking, compensation in the public sector is increasingly in the form of benefits, while compensation in the private sector is increasingly in the form of wages and salaries.

I take their graph, change the units to "Percent Change from Year Ago" --

and again, I have to wonder why they are talking about increase.

Oh, that's useful

Hover over the title of a data series on a FRED graph, and a tag pops up to tell you the title of that data series.

Wow.

What's missing? (Part two)

Here's the top part of a page of search results at FRED:

I searched for TCMD (which once meant "Total Credit Market Debt") expecting to find the several data series containing that four-letter sequence in the series name. You know, like TCMDO and TCMDODNS and FGTCMDODNS...

Then I sorted the list by Title. So the list starts with series titles beginning with "A", but that didn't help.

Then I did a screen capture to document the sort options available. I use Obs Start sometimes, when I'm looking for older data. That's about all I use, from that list.

(I wonder how Popularity differs from Search Rank. What determines search rank, if not popularity??)

//

See what's missing from the sort options? Series Name is missing from the list. Heck, there's not a series name on the whole page. If you want to know what's the series name for a series title like Domestic Nonfinancial Sectors; Credit Market Instruments; Liability, Level you have to display the graph of the series, then look in the Edit Data Series settings to find it. It's presented as a parenthetical afterthought -- class="muted" -- like this:

(a) Domestic Nonfinancial Sectors; Credit Market Instruments; Liability, Level, Billions of Dollars, Not Seasonally Adjusted (TCMDODNS)

To my mind, it's much easier to read a short name like TCMDO -- or a compound short name like

FG + TCMDO + DNS

than it is to read a long wordy title. (It's not like they provide technical definitions for all their wordy words.)

What's missing? C'mon, Fred. Show the damn series names in your search results. You want to make 'em muted? Make 'em muted, I don't give a shit. But show them.

// Find Part One here.

Inflexible Economists

In Inflexible Trends, I showed the new FRED Graph tool for adding lines to a graph. It's not bad. It has its uses. But they insist on calling their line a "trend line" when clearly it isn't. It's a straight, connect-the-dots line.

Here's the first graph from the FRED Blog of 7 May 2015...

... along with the settings that establish their trend line: start-point and end-point dates and values. But if you look at the graph, the data (blue) is almost entirely below the  red trend line.

Actually it looks as if the blue line spends most of its time curving back up toward the red line. If I was going to show a trend line for that graph, I think I'd show a sharp drop-off just after the recession, followed by a gradual curve back toward what FRED calls a trend line.

And there's the real problem I want to point out today: Economists too often insist on thinking of trends as straight lines. That's not the way the world is.

Inflexible Trends

When you make a graph at FRED, the first series you use establishes the start- and end-dates for the default display.

Maybe you start with a series that runs from 1947 to 2014. Then you add another series and divide the one by the other. But the new one you added only starts in 1967 maybe. So the computer cannot figure the first 20 years anymore, because it's a number you have, divided by a number you don't have. So they just leave that out.

But the default dates don't change. (That's probably a good thing.) So you are left with a plot area that starts at 1947, and a plotted line that only starts in 1967. The first 20 years of your graph show blank white space.

If you look at FRED graphs people have made, you'll often find those big white spaces in the starting years. You can find it on a lot of my FRED graphs, for sure. Maybe you never noticed. But now that you know about it, you'll see it all the time.


I started with a FRED graph showing Total Financial Assets (FRED's TFAABSHNO). The data runs from 1949 to 2014. Then I added the M1ADJ series (M1 Adjusted for Retail Sweeps) which runs from 1967 to 2013. So of course the plot area was blank for the years 1949-1966. Then I added a trend line to the graph. That's a new feature at FRED. Here's what I got:

Graph #1

The blue line, showing my calculated data, starts at 1967. But the red line, FRED's trend line, is shown on the graph starting at 1949.

What happened? The guys that added the trend line routine to the FRED code forgot to check where the data starts. They just went with the default start-date. And so that's what the graph shows.

This is funny stuff.

I knew about the reverse-order thing that I described above. So I created the graph again, from scratch. But this time I started with the series that starts in 1967, then added the series that starts in 1949. So by default, there is no blank white space. The years before 1967 are simply not shown.

Then I added the trend line again, and here's what I got:

Graph #2

I had a good laugh at that. Then I noticed that the red line is exactly the same on both graphs, and had another good laugh.

Then I noticed that the trend line is good for maybe the first dozen years and for the last few, and otherwise it is way the hell off from where it should be.

And then I noticed that they don't even do a trend calculation. The red line starts at the first value of the blue line, and ends at the last value of the blue line. And what they call a "trend line" is really just a straight line from the first blue point to the last blue point.

That's embarrassingly bad, I think.


But hey, don't take my word for it. Let's see what Excel gives us.

That's more like it.

Cross posted at The New Arthurian Economics

Christian Zimmermann has a bad day

FRED Blog says this graph "shows how the composition of M2 has changed over time." Sounds about right; that, and that the graph shows the components "as shares of total M2."

But that's not what the graph says. The graph says it shows "(Billions of Dollars)". If that is correct, then the graph shows that M2 money has been stable at 100 billion dollars since 1960. It shows that M1 money (the top edge of the green region) is now about 25 billion dollars, half as much as it was in 1960.

Hard to believe.

Of course, it is the label of the vertical axis that is wrong. The graph doesn't show billions of dollars. It shows percent of total M2.

This is an error in the "new" FRED Graphing routines -- one of many errors that still exist in those routines. The old FRED Graphing routines were pretty much free of such errors. Gone are the days.

I miss the old FRED.