With an abundance of sources for economic information, why should anyone read EconoIndicators?
News organizations (TV, newspaper, radio, wire services, plus blogs and other new media) provide lots of analysis and commentary on economic indicators and their impact. What they generally don’t provide is the actual underlying data. They tend to be heavy on commentary and light on actual data, leaving it for readers to find the full data set on their own. Rather than have to dig the sources for that data, you can find it here. And here, it’s light on commentary. There is some analysis involved in the initial decision of which key facts to include in the “At a Glance” statistics, but the full data is always available to the reader at a click.
Why not just get the information straight from the source? The sources, government and private, that produce the indicators provide data dumps that go to the other extreme from the news organizations. You can visit EconoIndicators, see the vital data At a Glance on the front page (or in your newsreader) and drill down quickly to get the additional information you need.
The sources are also many and widely scattered. The government departments that produce statistics produce different statistics from different agencies. For example, the Commerce Department produces economic indicators from the Census Bureau and the Bureau of Economic Analysis. The Commerce Department did have a website - economicindicators.gov - that offered an opportunity to subscribe to data from both bureaus, but it is being phased out effective March 2008 due to budget constraints. That site also charged for some data (that was freely available elsewhere - including here). Here you can subscribe to data from the Commerce Department, the Labor Department, the Treasury Department, the Federal Reserve, the Conference Board, the National Association of Realtors, the Mortgage Bankers Association, the Institute for Supply Management and several other organizations all at once, at no charge. You can even use the data to provide an economic news feed on your own site.
