Economic and market dashboards

Public economic data is free, deep, and almost unusable raw. The series that matter are scattered across FRED, BLS, BEA, and market feeds under opaque symbol codes, and the interesting question is usually a transformation (year over year, a rolling average, a state-by-state comparison) rather than the raw level.

A manually updated chart is easy to leave behind when new data arrives. I needed a repeatable way to retrieve observations, apply consistent transformations, and show readers which period they were seeing.

The Quarto documents used R chunks to retrieve series through tidyquant's FRED interface, reshape them with tidyverse and timetk, and render Plotly charts with hover labels. I used reactable and gt where a table made comparisons easier. That render-time workflow belongs to the R project; rebuilding this static site alone does not fetch new observations.

The part that matters is that I stopped copy-pasting chart code between pages. The ticker universe, the cleaning functions, the plotting wrapper, the recession shading, and the palette live in one R package of my own that all sixteen pages call into, so a change to the house style lands everywhere at once. It is version-pinned and reused by a second property, which is what took it from a personal convenience to shared infrastructure.