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WSJ blog posting: The Crisis Recedes. So Does the Economy
In the article, David Gaffen cites figures from the Federal Reserve’s Empire Manufacturing Index, claiming it fell to a “record low”, but the data presented only shows 12 months of history.
Here is the entire history of the General Business Conditions index back to 2001 when they [...]

Commercial Paper statistics

Excellent program on This American Life last week about the credit crisis: Another Frightening Show About the Economy.
The program includes a discussion of the importance of the commercial paper market in the routine operation of the U.S. economy.
The Federal Reserve collects weekly and monthly figures on the commercial paper market:

Commercial Paper statistics

See the overnight commercial [...]

Debt in the U.S.

The Federal Reserve collects a lot of data related to consumer and institutional debt. I’ve collected a bunch of these figures on this topic page.
Some interesting data series:

Residential mortgage delinquency rate

Nonborrowed reserves of depository institutions (I don’t know what this means, but it sure looks bad.)

New employment data

Latest employment figures are out from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
The corresponding Numbrary tables have been updated.
At 6.1%, we’re almost at the peak unemployment rate from the last cycle.

Real Estate data sources

Here’s a summary of some major sources of data on the US real estate market.
Housing price indexes are available from the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight (federal agency, part of HUD), and also from Standard&Poor’s. The OFHEO and S&P data are apparently calculated using similar, but not identical, formulas; Calculated Risk has a [...]

Why can’t we all do this sort of analysis?

Professor James Hamilton at UC San Diego comments on Econbrowser about Ben Bernanke and the current economic situation. Quote:
We’ve seen some quite remarkable movements in commodity markets the last two months. The graph below plots the price of 14 that I could get my hands on quickly through Webstract, with each price normalized at [...]

Import/Export Price Indexes from BLS

The full set of Import/Export Price Indexes is currently being loaded from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. These figures are indexes, not dollar amounts.
An interesting trend is the 12-month change in total imports, currently at an all-time high since data collection started in 1983.

Wage trends

Trends in private employment wages, with links back to the BLS data series from the Current Employment Statistics program.

12-month change in hourly earnings
12-month change in weekly earnings
12-month change in hourly earnings, adjusted for inflation
12-month change in weekly earnings, adjusted for inflation

I see no explanation on the BLS site of why the hourly and weekly figures [...]

Union Affiliation Numbers

In Union Rates Increase in 2007, the Center for Economic and Policy Research quotes labor figures indicating that labor union membership increased last year, the first such increase since union membership data collection began in 1983.
The CEPR article cites Unionstats.com as the source of their data, though the original source of this data is the [...]

Peter Skomoroch’s list of datasets

Some Datasets Available on the Web – a terrific list of public datasets.
This list includes text sources, reference materials and a lot of other items besides links to numeric data.