Data & Statistics for Journalists: Economics & Business

Commodities Futures Trading Commission (CFTC)

Dept. of Commerce / Census Bureau

Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC)

• FDIC Industry Analysis, with information on specific banks, analyses on the banking industry and economic trends.
• FDIC Failed Bank List. List of failed financial institutions since October 2000, summaries, points of contact and historical statistics.

Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council (FFIEC)

• Central Data Repository's Public Data Distribution. Information on Call Reports and Uniform Bank Performance Reports (UBPR) are organized by subject, and include earnings, balance sheet, asset quality, liquidity and capital.
• Home Mortgage Disclosure Act Data Products. Home mortgage lending activity in the United States, including flat files, maps and charts. You can also generate custom queries.

The Federal Reserve

• Consumer Credit data (Released Annually). Yearly, quarterly and monthly figures on outstanding credit balances, flow and changes; terms of credit; and interest rates, maturity, loan-to-value ratios and finance amounts.
• Finance Companies data (Released Quarterly). Aggregate information on debt held, flows and changes. Includes loans for new and used cars, real estate and equipment, as well as other receivables.
• Foreign Exchange Rates (Weekly Release). Weekly data on a range of major currencies as well as broad trends.
• FRED Government Receipts, Expenditures, Investments. Includes expenditures for consumption-related items, transfers, investments and social benefits.
• Money Stock Measures. Two years of monthly data on the supply of cash, deposits and checks outside of the private banking system (known as M1) and the sum of M1 plus savings and money-market accounts, retail money market mutual funds and CDs under $100,000 (known as M2).
• FRED Treasury Interest Rates data. Daily, weekly and monthly data on Treasury bills, including four-week, three-month, and one-year. Both secondary-market and auction averages are available.
• The St. Louise Fed’s FRED economic database offers more than 200,000 data series, including the consumer price index, real GDP and unemployment. FRED offers a wealth of interactive tools you can use to generate graphs of the data series of your choice.

Federal Trade Commission (FTC)

• Consumer Sentinel Network Data Book (Fraud Identity Theft): The CSN report, in PDF form, contains aggregate data on more than 9 million complaints from 2009 through 2013.

International Trade Commission (ITC)

• Trade and Tariff data. Provides data on thousands of goods, from agricultural products to manufactured items. Includes annual value, tariff treatment and rate, and country-specific exceptions.

Department of Labor

• Bureau of Labor Statistics: Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages.
• Foreign Labor Certification Office: H-1B Disclosure data. The H-1B non-immigrant visa allows U.S. employers to temporarily employ foreign workers in specific occupations. The data, based on the U.S. fiscal year, is available in Access and CSV format files. Data File Structure
• Labor Retirement and Welfare Benefit Plan data set. The Form 5500 Annual Report provides information about the operation, funding and investments of approximately 800,000 retirement and welfare-benefit plans. Related data is available from the IRS (see below).
• Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA): Establishment Specific Injury & Illness Data. Searchable database and text-format data on a representative sample of workplace incidents, from 1996 through 2011.
• OSHA: Establishment Data (Inspection Data). Originally an in-house resource for OSHA staff and state agencies, it includes data on OSHA interventions and enforcement activity at specific work sites.
• OSHA: Fatality Inspection Data. List of workplace incidents that result in casualties or hospitalizations.

Department of Treasury

• Bureau of Fiscal Service: Public debt reports, including debt position and activity, Treasury receipts, outlays of the U.S. Government, schedules of Federal debt, and Treasury securities.
• Financial Crime Enforcement Network: Mortgage and real estate fraud data. Searchable by state, urban area and county; includes resources for the public and institutions.
• Interest Rate Statistics, including daily Treasury yield curve rates as well as Treasury bill rates and long-term averages.
• Internal Revenue Service (IRS): Corporate Tax Statistics (Form 1120).
• IRS: Employee benefit plans (Form 5500). Related data is available from the Department of Labor (see above).
• IRS: Individual tax statistics (Form 1040).
• IRS: Quarterly payroll taxes (Form 941).

Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC)

• SEC filings. The SEC’s EDGAR database allows you to search filings by company, address, state, country, and date, and well as mutual funds and insurance products; advanced search allows the use of Boolean operators. (See the related Journalist’s Resource post, “How to Use SEC filings to Cover Companies,” on how six common SEC filings can help you better report on U.S. businesses.)
• Mutual fund fees and expenses. Includes interactive data and mutual fund risk/return summaries.
• Program and market data. Eighteen datasets on everything from administrative law decisions to summary metrics.
• Short sale volume data.

Small Business Administration (SBA)

• Small business lender and loan data. Information on the 100 most-active 7(a) lenders as well as additional resources.

Social Security Administration (SSA)

• Social Security Research, Statistics & Policy Analysis. The SSA’s Annual Statistical Supplement includes hundreds of statistical tables with data on beneficiary counts and benefit amounts, and the status of the program’s trust funds.
• Earnings and employment data for workers covered under Social Security and Medicare. Available in PDF and XLS form, the report and data cover the year 2011 and were released in 2014.