Why this site exists
Economic statistics are public, but they are scattered across a dozen agency websites, published in formats few people read, and rarely explained. ChartWidgets puts 65 of the most important US indicators in one place, draws each as a clean interactive chart with its complete history, and pairs it with a short guide: what the number measures, how to read it, why it matters and what usually moves it.
The charts are also built to travel. Bloggers, teachers, journalists, financial advisers and anyone else running a website can drop a live chart into an article and it will keep itself current.
Our data
Almost every figure is an official statistic from a US government source – the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the Bureau of Economic Analysis, the Federal Reserve Board, the Census Bureau, the Department of Labor, the Energy Information Administration, the Federal Housing Finance Agency or the Treasury Department. The one exception is the 30-year mortgage rate, which comes from Freddie Mac’s Primary Mortgage Market Survey and is reproduced with attribution. We retrieve most series from FRED, maintained by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, once a day. The car insurance index comes directly from the Bureau of Labor Statistics data API, and the daily Debt to the Penny total from Treasury’s Fiscal Data service. Recession shading uses the business-cycle dates of the National Bureau of Economic Research.
A few charts involve a simple calculation on our side: 12-month percentage changes (inflation, wage, sales and price growth), monthly averages of daily market data (yields, oil, gas), the misery index, which adds unemployment and inflation, the Sahm rule, calculated from the unemployment rate, the federal deficit summed over the latest 12 months, and the recession probability, which applies the Federal Reserve Bank of New York’s published yield-curve model to Treasury rates. Each chart page names the exact series it uses and offers the full history as a CSV file.
Embedding a chart
Any chart can be placed on another website with two lines of code that keep themselves up to date. The Embed page has a generator for every chart, step-by-step instructions for WordPress, Blogger, Squarespace, Wix and Ghost, and the full list of settings and chart ids.
Glossary
New to some of the terms? The economics glossary explains the indicators behind the charts – from CPI and core inflation to the yield curve and the misery index – with worked examples and historical readings.
Using the charts
You may embed any chart on any website, commercial or not, free of charge. We only ask that the two credit links in the embed code stay visible and unchanged. The government statistics themselves are in the public domain; the mortgage rate series is © Freddie Mac and must keep its attribution. Please read the disclaimer, and write to support@chartwidgets.com with questions or ideas for new charts.