"What Dates Are Used for the U.S. Recession Bars?"

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.

Annual aggregation of Quarterly debt using EOP

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.

Dropping the first year's data...

Same topic as the previous post, which I didn't show til this morning.

I  got TCMDODNS

converted the frequency to ANNUAL and the aggregation method to END OF PERIOD.

The graph shows data beginning with 1946.

But the excel download shows data beginning with 1947.

It would be GREAT if the download began with 1945. As it stands, I retrieve that item using "+more" and "ViewAll" in the "observation" box, just above the graph on the left.

PS: I love FRED

I need details and more checking

 

Happened twice in the last two days: I make a graph of one series divided by another. The graph shows data starting in 1946. I export the data to Excel. Excel shows data starting in 1947.

Gasp!

Religiously. I do it religiously

So, I set my FRED graphs to 800 pixels wide by the default height, 450 I think. I even keep my browser set at a width that gives me the 800-pixel graph width automatically. Or anyway I did, until a recent update of the FREDGraph system.

Now I get the graph all set up as I want it, 800 pixels wide and all, and use the Firefox browser's "take a screenshot" button to perfectly capture the image -- the button "knows" where the edges of the graph are, so it is easy to capture an image that needs no cropping.

I used this method religiously. Since the update, it no longer works as expected.

This time, instead of opening the file after saving it, I right-clicked it and clicked "Properties". The "Details" tab tells me that the size of the image is 640 x 360.

It's back

When the edit window opens, the graph is resized to be less wide. The line-title text wraps automatically, and the second line-title is over-written:

I had not seen this error for some time. It came back in the last month or so, perhaps as a result of the recent updating that was noted at the top of the  https://fred.stlouisfed.org/  page.

This is definitely a glitch that comes and goes. I think fixing something else brings it back.