Dear FREDcast players,
Thank you for being a part of our FREDcast community. We’ve enjoyed all the great economic forecasting over the past 5 years.
After carefully assessing regular usage and the resources we must commit to supporting this product, we have decided to discontinue FREDcast.
The June forecasting period (from May 21, 2021, until June 20, 2021) will be the last one to enter your forecasts. The scoring of forecasted values will occur on July 2, 2021, for unemployment rate and payroll employment; on July 13, 2021, for CPI inflation; and on July 29, 2021, for the real GDP growth rate.
The FREDcast website will be unavailable after August 1, 2021.
We know a change like this can be disruptive, especially for those who have used FREDcast as a teaching tool. We’d like to suggest some alternatives to engage your students with current events and FRED data.
- Econ Lowdown recently added short reading Q&As by adapting material from the FRED Blog. Consider using this post on the uneven impact of the COVID-19-induced recession on the unemployment rates of men and women as a pre-lecture assignment.
- You can also improve your students’ graph-building and graph-reading skills by using FRED Interactives in Econ Lowdown. This module uses live data from FRED to calculate U.S. GDP per capita and compare it with China’s GDP per capita.
- Student work on both the FRED Blog readings and FRED Interactives is automatically graded and imported into your Canvas LMS gradebook. Learn how to make it happen here.
As always, thank you for your continued trust in the economic resources from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis.
