Fed Rate Analysis

Introduction

This project provides the tools for fetching, processing, and visualizing interest rate data from the Federal Reserve Economic Data (FRED) database. The tool enables analysis of historical interest rate trends through automated data collection and visualization.

Environment Setup

Prerequisites

• Python 3.7 or newer

Install required packages

pip install pandas numpy pandas-datareader matplotlib

Project Structure

• Data Fetching (data_fetch.py)
  • Fetches interest rate data from the FRED database using a series ID and data range.
• Data Processing (data_processing.py)
  • Prepares the dataframe by handling missing values, setting the date as the index, and resamples to monthly frequency.
• Visualization (visualization.py)
  • Generates two plots: line plot for actual interest rates over time and a line plot of log changes in interest rates.
• Main Script (main.py)
  • Executes the pipeline of data fetching, processing, and visualization using the command line.

Usage

To run the main script, use the following example for the command line:

python src/main.py <series_id> <start_date> <end_date> -o <output_directory>

• Description of placeholders:
  • <series_id>: The FRED series ID (e.g., "FEDFUNDS")
  • <start_date> and <end_date>: Dates in YYYY-MM-DD format.
  • <output_directory>: Path to the directory for saving the processed data and plots (optional). Defaults to current directory.

Example:

python src/main.py FEDFUNDS 2015-01-01 2023-12-31 -o ./output