Check US Economic Data Through FRED and Your Muse

Through a custom connector, your muse can read US economic data from FRED in plain words, so you can ask what inflation, jobs, or interest rates are doing without opening a chart tool first.

What it does

FRED is the economic database run by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. It holds about 800,000 time series from more than 100 sources, covering output, inflation, employment, interest rates, and exchange rates. Connected this way, everything is read only. The muse can search for a series by words, read its values for a period you name, and explain the series itself: its units, how often it is published, whether it is seasonally adjusted, and when it was last updated. It can show values as a year-over-year percent change, or combine daily values into monthly or quarterly ones. It can browse topics by category, list releases and their coming dates, list recently updated series, and show revision history, including what a series showed on a past date before revisions.

How to use it

1. Start an AnythingMCP workspace and install the FRED connector.
2. Create a free FRED account, open API Keys, request a key, and paste it where the connector asks for FRED_API_KEY.
3. In Muse, open Settings, then Connectors, and add a custom connector with the MCP server address AnythingMCP gives you. Sign in and approve.
4. Ask in plain words, for example for the latest unemployment rate, or for inflation over the last two years shown as a yearly percent change.
5. Ask the muse to name the series, its units, and the date of the latest value in its answer, so you can check the figure at the source.

What you need

• A Muse account that can add custom connectors
• An AnythingMCP account with the FRED connector added
• A free FRED account and API key

What to watch for

• Monthly and quarterly series are published with a lag. The latest value is for an earlier period, so quote its date, not today.
• Check units and seasonal adjustment before you compare two series. A level, a percent change, and a seasonally adjusted figure answer different questions.
• Some series come from outside sources with their own terms in the series notes. Name the source when you reuse a figure.
• The key allows up to 120 requests a minute. Wide sweeps can hit that limit and pause.
• This is a custom connector, and Meta does not review custom connectors. You can disconnect it in Settings at any time. The muse prepares, you decide.