Ever have a hankering to learn how much money the wealthiest of the wealthy have, or whether charges on other people’s credit cards accumulate in the same way yours do? Do you wonder how much home prices are going up in your state or how much interest banks pay when they borrow overnight?
Some of the 2022 additions to the FRED economic database make it possible to get more-detailed answers to questions about U.S. households, interest rates and businesses.
Here are a few highlights, with some explanations and examples via FRED Blog posts. Unless otherwise noted, the featured blog posts were suggested by Diego Mendez-Carbajo, a senior economic education specialist at the St. Louis Fed.
Keeping Tabs on Shares of U.S. Wealth among Household Groups
The Federal Reserve Board gives quarterly estimates of how wealth is distributed among U.S. households, via the Distributional Financial Accounts data series. In September 2022, FRED added 117 new series from that data set, “which allows us to identify wealth holdings of segments of the population, from the top 0.1% through the bottom 50%,” as the FRED Blog post “The Wealthiest 0.1% of Households” explained in October.
At the time of the post, the wealthiest 130,757 households in total had almost twice as much wealth as the 65 million households in the bottom half. Each of those wealthiest households had at least $38 million in assets.
The blog post was followed with another—“Counting the Wealthiest 0.1% of Households”—on some of the vagaries of measuring that 0.1% group.
Tracking Credit Card Use and Mortgages
If your credit card starts to get a little warm from frequent use around November, you know that it has plenty of company because credit card use grows in the holiday season. Using data from another Federal Reserve System source—the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia—a December 2022 FRED Blog post showed rising waves of credit card use in the fourth quarters of 10 years.
In September 2022, FRED added 75 data series to the credit card and mortgage data, which is provided by the largest banks in the U.S.
“Save this quarterly dataset to your FRED account for a trove of unique intelligence on credit cards, first-lien mortgages, first-lien home equity loans, consumer habits, credit quality, and percentile indicators,” urged an Oct. 17, 2022, post suggested by Jeremy Cohn, a Philadelphia Fed analyst.
The blog post also pointed out that the Philadelphia Fed produces an “Insights” report on the data.
Not enough fresh loan data for you? There also were additions to data series from two Federal Reserve Board releases on business and consumer loans and consumer credit.
Gauging U.S. Home Prices
Early last year, FRED added 52 series on the Zillow Home Value Index, or ZHVI. The index “measures the typical dollar value of a composite of homes,” including single-family homes, condos and co-ops, as a Feb. 10, 2022, blog post explained.
The post compared the ZHVI home value growth in the U.S. with that measured by Standard & Poor’s S&P/Case-Shiller home-price index and an index from the U.S. Federal Housing Finance Agency. There were similar patterns despite different methodologies, specifically “a marked up-and-down cycle in the late 2000s and faster growth in home prices after 2020.”
The ZHVI series go beyond national numbers. You can check out the patterns in many states as well.
Plotting Banks’ Borrowing Costs
FRED added to the “benchmark” interest rates in its collection in spring 2022, with series including average overnight borrowing rates in financial markets from the American Financial Exchange.
The “AMERIBOR” series reflect the “borrowing costs of thousands of small, medium, and regional banks across America,” according to the March announcement of the additions. It’s also useful to other organizations, like the larger banks that do business with those smaller ones, and small- and middle-market companies, the announcement said.
The chart below shows the overnight unsecured AMERIBOR benchmark interest rate and two-year AMERIBOR term structure of interest rates.
Mapping New Businesses
A July FRED Blog post was the first to use the database’s new mapping feature, which allows users to map and share data directly in FRED and replaced the GeoFRED website.
The post checked out business applications by state during 2021, with a focus on Alaska. Below is the map updated with 2022 data, which shows the strongest year-over-year growth for applications in Western states, among others.
If you’re hungry for other kinds of business data, FRED in 2022 also added hundreds of series from the Federal Reserve Board on industrial production and capacity utilization.
