FRED time series

Fetch any of FRED's ~800,000 economic time series by series ID - GDP (GDPC1), CPI (CPIAUCSL), unemployment (UNRATE), fed funds (DFF), and so on. Send GET /api/fred-series with the required field seriesId and pay $0.005 per call over x402 or MPP (there is no free tier). It returns a JSON object with seriesId, count, observations and source.

Supports date windowing and the standard FRED units transformations (lin, chg, ch1, pch, pc1, pca, cca, log). ?seriesId=GDPC1&startDate=2018-01-01&endDate=2023-12-31&units=pc1 This product uses the FRED(R) API but is not endorsed or certified by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis.

Category: Live public data · Tags: fred series time-series gdp cpi inflation unemployment fed

TRY IN PLAYGROUND →

Parameters

Example request

curl -i "https://agent402.tools/api/fred-series?seriesId=GDPC1&startDate=2018-01-01&endDate=2022-12-31"

Without payment this returns HTTP 402 Payment Required with the exact price for fred-series; any x402 v2 or MPP client pays it and retries.

Example response

{
  "seriesId": "GDPC1",
  "count": 20,
  "observations": [
    {
      "date": "2018-01-01",
      "value": 18733
    }
  ],
  "source": "FRED (St. Louis Fed)"
}

From an MCP client

catalog.call {
  "slug": "fred-series",
  "params": {
    "seriesId": "GDPC1",
    "startDate": "2018-01-01",
    "endDate": "2022-12-31"
  }
}

The hosted connector at https://agent402.tools/mcp needs a payment for fred-series; the stdio package pays it from a wallet or from AGENT402_CREDITS_KEY. Local install: npx -y agent402-mcp.

Errors and behavior

• seriesId is required. An input the tool rejects returns an HTTP 4xx whose body carries error, tool, expected, required and example, so the caller can correct it.
• A paid call that ends in any status of 400 or above is not charged over x402, MPP or a prepaid credits key: settlement is cancelled when the tool fails. The exception is a Tempo push credential, a transfer the buyer sent before the call: it settles before the tool runs, so if the tool then fails the payment is recorded as a refund owed to the paying wallet.
• Wallet-only: this tool reaches the network or stored state, so it has no proof-of-work tier. A prepaid card-credits key issued earlier (Authorization: Bearer a402_...) also pays it.
• A POST with a JSON body to /api/fred-series is served as this GET, with the body as the input.
• An Idempotency-Key header makes a retried paid call replay the first 200 instead of charging again (an answer larger than 1 MB is not replayed).

Paid call (JavaScript agent)

import { wrapFetchWithPayment } from "@x402/fetch";
import { x402Client } from "@x402/core/client";
import { registerExactEvmScheme } from "@x402/evm/exact/client";
import { privateKeyToAccount } from "viem/accounts";

const client = new x402Client();
client.setSpendControls?.(false); // keep your own spending ceiling in code
registerExactEvmScheme(client, { signer: privateKeyToAccount(KEY) });
const payFetch = wrapFetchWithPayment(fetch, client);

const res = await payFetch("https://agent402.tools/api/fred-series?seriesId=GDPC1&startDate=2018-01-01&endDate=2022-12-31");

Part of these workflows

FRED time series is one step in these 4 skill packs, each sold as a single call:

• Financial research - Pull SEC filings, the latest close, historical prices, and macro context for a single ticker in one pass.
• Trend analysis - Take any numeric time series - a stock's daily close, a FRED macro indicator, a treasury yield history - and run it through the full quantitative workup: descriptives, moving averages, trend line, outliers, optional correlation against a benchmark, and a deterministic forecast forward with a 95% prediction interval. Everything an analyst writes a notebook for, in one chain of cheap calls.
• Forecasting bake-off - Don't guess which forecasting method to trust. Backtest all four (naive/drift, SES, Holt, Holt-Winters) on a real series, rank by out-of-sample RMSE, then forecast forward with the winner and its 95% prediction interval. Method selection without the hand-waving.
• Fed economic snapshot - Key Federal Reserve economic indicators - fed funds rate, unemployment, and CPI - in one call.

Related tools