FRED (Federal Reserve Economic Data)
FRED is a reference database of economic and financial time series run by the Research Division of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. It gathers roughly 845,000 series from more than 120 providers, including national statistical agencies, central banks, and commercial data vendors, covering measures such as GDP, employment, inflation, interest rates, exchange rates, money supply, and regional and international indicators. Series carry consistent metadata: frequency, units, seasonal adjustment, source, and revision history.
Access is free. You browse and download individual series as CSV or Excel from the website, or register for a free API key and query the REST API, which returns JSON or XML and supports search, series observations, releases, categories, and tags. Well maintained client libraries exist in Python and R, which makes bulk retrieval straightforward for pipelines.
For RAG and AI work, FRED is best treated as a structured numeric and metadata source rather than a text corpus. It suits agents and assistants that need to look up current or historical figures, and the rich series descriptions and release notes give useful context to index alongside the numbers. It is strong for grounding answers about the economy in authoritative, dated observations.
Watch the licensing carefully. FRED itself is free to use, but many individual series are owned by third parties and carry their own copyright notices and restrictions, so the terms on the underlying data can differ from the platform terms. The API terms of use prohibit bulk scraping and repackaging FRED as your own product, and copyrighted series may require permission before commercial or redistribution use. Attribution and citation are expected. If you need broader international coverage or bulk statistical downloads, the World Bank Open Data and OECD Data platforms are useful complements already worth cataloguing.
Related sources
Eurostat
The statistical office of the European Union, providing official statistics for Europe. Covers the economy, population, environment, agriculture, trade, and more across EU member states, with harmonised figures that let you compare countries on a like-for-like basis.
IMF Data
A gateway to the IMF's global economic data, giving streamlined access to macroeconomic and financial statistics. Includes International Financial Statistics covering balance of payments, interest rates, national accounts, prices, production, trade, and population for more than 200 countries.
OECD Data
Reports, data, and publications on the economic, environmental, and social conditions in hundreds of countries. Includes International Development Statistics covering aid volume, origin, and types, plus the Creditor Reporting System with detailed information on individual aid activities.
Our World in Data
Research and interactive visualisations on global problems, built by aggregating and harmonising data from official sources. Every chart can be downloaded as a ZIP containing a CSV file, JSON metadata, and a README, and the underlying data is available programmatically via an API. Full provenance is documented for every dataset.