fredusex regains access to the Federal Reserve Economic Data (FRED) database

[KitBaum]

David Drukker's excellent freduse routine of 2006 (see Stata Journal, 6(3)) can no longer access data from FRED, as the maintainers switched from text files to a HTML format for the series earlier this year. The original freduse provided access to 3,000 US economic time series. FRED currently contains over 814,000 time series from 114 sources. The routine fredusex, available from the SSC archive, regains access to FRED contents. It requires Stata version 16, as it makes use of frames. Please let me know if you have any problems with the fredusex routine. It is an alternative to Stata's own import fred, which requires use of an API key.

[Tom Bickerton]

Is it possible to access FRED with STATA version 13? Can you please tell me how I've tried various suggestions on the web and they all seem to require a higher version of STATA. Several years ago, I was able to access FRED with STATA version 13. Thanks. tom

[Nick Cox]

As reported in #2 freduse no longer works. fredusex requires Stata 16, as also reported, so the problem seems to need writing your own code.

[Peter Claeys]

When I use the example on the help for fredusex, I get a strange report:

fredusex gdp mehoinusmaa646n unrate mich cpiaucsl, data(fredtest)

fopen(): 679 unexpected web error
grabd(): - function returned error
<istmt>: - function returned error

I use Stata18. Installation functioned fine.

[Stephen Jenkins]

FWIW I get the same report using up-to-date version 19.5 (Win, MP4)

. fredusex gdp mehoinusmaa646n unrate mich cpiaucsl, data(fredtest)
                 fopen():   679  unexpected web error
                 grabd():     -  function returned error
                 <istmt>:     -  function returned error
r(679);

Similar issue with version 17 except that Stata still hasn't delivered a report after several minutes, It's "not responding"

The "web error" part of the message suggests that the FRED server is offline. (???)