Nobody ever told me this...

I do drawings for a living. Oh, not artistic stuff. Drawings to make things of wood and steel, at work. AutoCAD, almost entirely.

Been doing drawings for a living for a long time. Usually, when you put text on a drawing, it is horizontal. Sometimes it is vertical. Here's the thing nobody ever told me, but I found out by having to cock my head from one side to the other to read my own drawings: When you do text vertical, you want to turn them all the same way, so you can tilt your head to the left and read them all. You don't want to have to swing that weight to the left to read one annotation, then to the right to read the next one, then back again for another. You don't want to do that.

See the text labels for the left and right scales on this graph?

You're swingin' that weight to read them.

Kinda like assembly language mnemonics

NonFederal Debt relative to GDP

For me it is not easy to read the title of the above graph:

(All Sectors; Credit Market Instruments; Liability, Level-Federal Government; Credit Market Instruments; Liability, Level)/Gross Domestic Product
It is much easier for me to know that "TCMDO" is the number that measures "All Sectors; Credit Market Instruments; Liability, Level"... that "FGTCMDODNS" is the number that measures "Federal Government; Credit Market Instruments; Liability, Level"... and that "GDP" is "Gross Domestic Product"... and then to read this:

(TCMDO-FGTCMDODNS)/GDP
It's just easier.

Maybe it's me.

I like this one!

FREDBlog: The peculiar Swiss unemployment rate, 2 June 2014. I customized their graph to show recession bars:

Those recession bars are probably the NBER dates for U.S. recessions -- not really related to the Swiss economy. Which probably explains why FREDBlog had the recession bars turned off in the first place. Oh well.

The reason I like this post so much? Because it shows something "peculiar", unique, and interesting, as opposed to the tiresome political complaints you can find all over the web.

That's what graphs are for, you know? To see the interesting things.

It's a really big jump in unemployment, between 1990 and 1994. Remarkable.

Want to know something odd? The timing of that rise in Swiss unemployment corresponds precisely with a unique fall in the U.S. debt-per-dollar ratio.

Now that's odd.

"New"

I like the FRED Blog. They present little explanations of economic topics by using graphs, much as I do. Only, they know their topic better than I do. I can feel it in their posts. And that's fine. It's why I go there.

But there is a problem. Here are the first two sentences from their latest post, dated 29 May 2014:

What’s new in FRED? Beyond the pie charts we saw on the blog a week ago, FRED also features scatter plots, like the one shown here.

What do they mean, new? Here's a FRED graph from mine of 12 October 2012:

Graph #1: GDP vs TCMDO, YoY% Change (annual data)
Click graph for FRED source page #bJZ

Here's the first line of the first comment on that post, from Jazzbumpa:

Dang! I didn't know you could do a scatter plot at FRED.

That comment is dated October 12, 2012 at 1:58 PM



The Rules of Exposition: 1. Tell the truth.


P.S.: FRED's pie charts aren't new, either.

FRED Blog's May 1, 2014 post

Screen cap:

Nothing fancy, but not bad.

Anyway I wanted to fiddle with their graph, so I clicked "Customize" there at the bottom left corner of the FRED graph... the ALFRED graph.



Got an error!

So I hovered the mouse over the "Customize" text, right-clicked, and copied the link address:

http://alfred.stlouisfed.org/fred2/graph/?g=wUh

The last three characters on the right (wUh) identifies the graph. The rest of the link gets you to it. I figured they identified the graph correctly, but just put the wrong path somehow. So I made my own ALFRED graph, copied the link address, pasted it into a textfile and changed the last three letters to wUh:

http://alfred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=wUh

That works.

Orange for St. Pattie's Day?

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.