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 started the survey.

It does indeed show that recent values in October and March of this year have been the lowest ever (previous low was in November 2001).

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 paper interest rate bouncing around over the last month:

• Overnight AA Asset-backed Commercial Paper Interest Rate

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.)

The corresponding Numbrary tables have been updated.

At 6.1%, we’re almost at the peak unemployment rate from the last cycle.

Orders “plunged by the largest amount in nearly two years”, “a much worse performance than…economists had expected”.

Here’s the full historic trend bad to 1992, and the monthly percentage changes. From the chart, these latest figures don’t look particularly unusual.

• http://numbrary.com/topics/economy

None of the services mentioned, Numbrary included, is yet mature enough to satisfy even a fraction of the needs mentioned in the posting or the comments. But we’re all working on it!

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 discussion of the differences.

There are also figures from the National Association of Realtors and the National Association of Home Builders, two trade groups which monitor the housing industry for their members. HousingTracker.net spiders the NAR web site and extracts current market data on major metropolitan areas.

The US Census publishes various statistics on housing construction: this includes the Housing Starts figures that are covered prominently in the press every month, as well as construction spending, manufacturing housing, and more.

Vandema.com has several lists of links to additional resources related to the housing market.

If you have links to additional primary sources of real estate data, please reply in the comments.

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 100 for January 1. Every single one of these prices has risen dramatically since then. The most tame among the group has been zinc, which is up a mere 6.5% over the last two months, or 39% at an annual rate. Topping the group is wheat, up 46% over two months; I won’t try to translate that one into an annual inflation rate because I don’t want to scare you.

Prof. Hamilton clearly has access to data and tools that allow him to quickly (a) find recent historical prices on 14 commodities, (b) baseline all the figures to a common starting point, and (c) present them all together on a single chart.

For the rest of us, this could easily take a few hours. It shouldn’t. Much of the source data is publicly available, and the mathematical manipulations and charting capabilities have been available in spreadsheets for years.