Download specific macroeconomic data from FRED St. Louis economic databases and ETL the data. Many other data series can be found at the FRED’s website.
# get unemployment data time series from FRED St. Louis dfunrate <- get_fred_series("UNRATE", "unrate", observation_start = startdate, observation_end = enddate) # get University of Michigan consumer sentiment index data time series from FRED St. Louis dfumcsent <- get_fred_series("UMCSENT", "umcsent", observation_start = startdate, observation_end = enddate) # combine the two time series data into one data frame dfall <- cbind(dfunrate,dfumcsent) # strip or remove redundant month field from data downloaded from FRED St. Louis dfall <- dfall[,c(1,2,4)] # obtain the number of data points in the dataframe mdx <- (1:nrow(dfall)) # convert FRED date field from string to R's date type dfall$date <- as.Date(dfall$date)
There’s a nice chart builder on the FRED website too, but it’s good to be able to grab the data on your own.