I was feeling idle and decided to brush up on my economics analysis skills as one does. Being a fan of the big short, I share that fantasy of seeing a pattern in the data that can give you an edge in financial markets. The Federal Reserve is always putting out cool research and easily accessible data. Economists are probably the wildest when it comes to data transformations and models. You’ll see this in the social sciences as they need to be creative to torture the data to get some insights. This is the original paper for the financial conditions index.

Techniques Utilized

This was a fun little exercise and utilized several techniques that up and coming analysts should be familiar with (time series analysis, hitting Rest API endpoints, window functions, filters, Joins, and dataframe multiplication, and data visualization.

Github Repo