Do you know FRED?

No, I’m not talking about a particular person. I’m referencing the Federal Reserve Economic Data.

This all came about when I heard something so mind boggling that I had to do some research. Basically, I saw something that said the US had added 51 million jobs since 1989 or since the fall of the Berlin Wall. And that 50 million jobs were created under a Democrat President and 1 million under a Republican.

NO WAY!

This was an opportunity to do some data research, maybe using FRED.

I don’t know what prompted me but some time before I heard that astonishing statistic, I happened to be going through Excel’s add-ins just for the heck of it. I wanted to see what was out there and I came across FRED which could be very useful in financial modeling – maybe.

To get FRED as an add-in, you would go through the Developer tab and then click on Add-ins. You might have to set your Excel to show the Developer tab which you will have to research on – I won’t be describing that. There are plenty of websites that can easily tell you how to add the Developer into your menu.

After you click on the Add-in button, go through the STORE tab and maybe do a search on FRED.

Once you’ve added it, FRED will show up as a menu item. The blurry image below (this was from Microsoft’s Snip and Sketch tool which tends to blur things) shows but the Developer and the new FRED tab highlighted.

Note: I’m enlarging some of the images so you can see the pictures better. It seems I have a small option and then a HUGE option. The ones running across the page are the enlarged images.

Here’s what it looks like once you click on that FRED tab.

I’m highlighting in green the relevant tools that I used for this particular research: “Get Data” and “US Data”. You can explore the rest but for the purposes of this post, I’m just focusing on the tools used to gather the data.

“Get Data” actually goes out to the FRED site and pulls in the requested data so I want to use “US Data” first because it is here that I can see what kind of data I can pull from the Fed.

Here’s an image of what I get when I click on “US Data”.

Clicking on the “Population, Employment, and Labor Markets” option leads to:

Clicking on that highlighted option just leads me back to the spreadsheet with the word PAYEMS on cell A1. At this point, you are ready to bring in the data by clicking on “Get Data” from the menu. Doing so will bring in the data from the Fed. You can see PAYEMS in the image in cell A1 as well as all of the other data brought in from the Fed. This pull was run on 9/3/2024.

This data runs from 1939 through the latest update of 7/1/2024. The units are in thousands of persons and each month has how many were employed for that month. To get calculate the number of jobs created from January to February 1939, you just subtract the January employment number from the February number.

I went ahead and did some monthly and annual calculations and added in the party and President in power for that month.

The President and party data came from Wikipedia which I pulled in via Power Query. It’s kind of blurry but here it is. I had to make some adjustments to the data, especially in regard to the dates.

Once I got all of my necessary data, I started to play with the PivotTables to see if I could come up with the same stunning statistics. And boy, I got pretty close. The image below is actually a 2 page slide, so click on that arrow to move to the next slide. (New feature!)

It’s a two-part image where the first image shows the top part of the Excel screen, and the second image shows the spreadsheet scrolled down the page. At the bottom of the main pivot table on the left, you can see I got to a total of 50,399,000 – close enough to 51 million.

Apparently in grabbing an image I cut off a portion of the pivot table in the upper right but at least you get the thrust of it.

So, a little caveat to this unbelievable data. There’s a lag timing effect that occurs after bad market events, especially so close to a Presidential transition. Bill Clinton oversaw the beginning of the internet era and then the dot.com crash came at the very end. I’m not sure of the exact timing but George W. Bush had to deal with that, as well as the whole Enron and MCI debacle. Those two debacles were probably brewing during the Clinton era.

George W. Bush, at the very end of his second term, oversaw the collapse of Lehman Brothers which precipitated the ensuing debacle that Obama then had to wrestle with. The jobs created by Obama was from climbing out of the deep, deep, deep hole we fell into, with lots of jobs lost. I wonder if this event, called the Great Recession, is what started the crazy behavior we see in politics today.

Anyway, this is to say that we have to consider the background of what could be driving those numbers.

But they are still fricking unbelievable.

Using FRED is going to be a lot of fun!