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Interactive demo
The spread between the 10-year and 2-year Treasury yields is the most-watched recession signal in markets. When it turns negative, the yield curve has inverted: short money pays more than long money, which markets only do when they expect the economy to slow. This chart plots it on real public FRED data, back to 1976, with every NBER recession shaded, so you can see the pattern for yourself. It is one of the sixteen economic dashboards I maintain, ported from R to a live, dependency-free chart on this static site.
Prefer the written version? Read how to read the yield curve on the blog.
A small Node generator pulls two series (the 10-year and 2-year constant-maturity Treasury yields) from the public FRED endpoint run by the Federal Reserve, computes the monthly spread, and writes a static JSON. This page fetches that JSON and draws it with a hand-rolled, dependency-free SVG line chart, so the whole thing is a static export with no server and no charting library. It mirrors the pull-at-render-time model of the R/Quarto dashboards it came from: the data is real and refreshes when the generator is re-run, rather than being a screenshot that silently goes stale. The recession bands are NBER business-cycle dates.
View the raw data that drives this page.
The generator re-pulls both Treasury series and the page redraws from the result, so what you are reading is never a screenshot from last quarter. I would rather build that than maintain a slide.