Check

Make sure you have a working API key and know how to get data.

library(tidyverse)
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library(plotly)
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library(fredr)

Set your FRED API key

fredr_set_key("2923ccf83015d6b33cfda99a3c83093e")

Get the Unemployment Rate

unratef = fredr_series_observations(
  series_id = "UNRATE",
  observation_start = as.Date("1980-01-01"),
  frequency = "q")

unrate = unratef$value

ung = ggplot(unratef,aes(x=date,y=value)) +
  geom_point(size=.5)
ggplotly(ung)

Structure

Look at structure of unratef.

Solution

str(unratef)
## tibble [183 × 5] (S3: tbl_df/tbl/data.frame)
##  $ date          : Date[1:183], format: "1980-01-01" "1980-04-01" ...
##  $ series_id     : chr [1:183] "UNRATE" "UNRATE" "UNRATE" "UNRATE" ...
##  $ value         : num [1:183] 6.3 7.3 7.7 7.4 7.4 7.4 7.4 8.2 8.8 9.4 ...
##  $ realtime_start: Date[1:183], format: "2025-10-28" "2025-10-28" ...
##  $ realtime_end  : Date[1:183], format: "2025-10-28" "2025-10-28" ...
head(unratef)
## # A tibble: 6 × 5
##   date       series_id value realtime_start realtime_end
##   <date>     <chr>     <dbl> <date>         <date>      
## 1 1980-01-01 UNRATE      6.3 2025-10-28     2025-10-28  
## 2 1980-04-01 UNRATE      7.3 2025-10-28     2025-10-28  
## 3 1980-07-01 UNRATE      7.7 2025-10-28     2025-10-28  
## 4 1980-10-01 UNRATE      7.4 2025-10-28     2025-10-28  
## 5 1981-01-01 UNRATE      7.4 2025-10-28     2025-10-28  
## 6 1981-04-01 UNRATE      7.4 2025-10-28     2025-10-28