Originally posted on Tuesday, July 10th, 2012
Re-inclusion of gold prices in the database of the St. Louis Fed is yet another indication of the rehabilitation of gold.
Civil servants commonly have a donnish sense of humor.
The Library of Congress named its database Thomas, after Jefferson. The SEC’s: EDGAR.
The Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis? FRED, for Federal Reserve Economic Data.
Business Insider breathlessly reports:
A huge development happened in the world of economic chart-making today. FRED, the brilliant economics data and charts site that’s run by the St. Louis Federal reserve, has finally added gold prices to the database.
Now at the tip of your fingers is gold priced in dollars and pounds going back to 1968, and gold priced in euros going back to 1999.
Not only is gold a fascinating commodity/quasi-money in its own right, there are so many myths about what gold is, and what its price represents, the inclusion of gold in this very easy-to-use database will prove to be incredibly useful.
To celebrate the introduction of the gold data, we’ve whipped up a handful of charts we’ve been wanting to make for awhile.
Here is the FRED rendition of average hourly earnings priced in gold (what fraction of an ounce of gold you can get for working one hour) as generated by BI:
Re-inclusion of gold prices in the database of the St. Louis Fed is yet another indication of the rehabilitation of gold. Gold emerges from its status as a commodity outlawed in the 1930s to a recognized factor in the world financial system. This represents further evidence of the resurgence of the gold standard as having been reestablished as a respectable proposition in monetary policy circles.
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