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.