Updated regularly Archive:

Alphadesigner continues to take satirical mapping to a new level, with several dozen maps of stereotypes, from many different perspectives, updated regularly.world-according-to-the-united-states-of-americaeurope-according-to-britain

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One of my favorite economic dashboards. It highlights major macro indicators, what direction they are trending, what the typical ranges are, and lets you drill down to explanations of why you should care. Looks like a lot of indicators are finally in the “typical” range.

Things might be getting back to normal.

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A nice interactive from USA Today. Select your job sector and see where in the country the most growth has been, and is projected to happen in the next year. They update this monthly.

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One of my favorite economic dashboards. It highlights major macro indicators, what direction they are trending, what the typical ranges are, and lets you drill down to explanations of why you should care about these numbers.

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I’m not a fan of the Heritage Foundation, and the one time I dug into the data of their Economic Freedom Index I found that they occasionally compare apples and oranges to get around data scarcity – BUT: they do put a large research effort into the report each year. The below interactive map is well executed – but you should drill down to country level data to get a feel for what is really being measured (click on a country, then the “learn more about this country” link that pops up in the lower left. Why this requires two steps I have no idea).

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Updated for January: one of my favorite economic dashboards. It highlights major macro indicators, what direction they are trending, what the typical ranges are, and lets you drill down to explanations of why you should care. In other words, it’s a very sleek example of how to graph snapshot data while still providing valuable context.

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I haven’t posted this version in a while, but the WSJ does keep it up to date with the latest data. I think it’s a lovely use of a heatmap.

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If you want to know the state of the US economy at any time, check out the below visualizations from Russell Investments and the AP. They are both updated monthly with the latest data, allow all kinds of drilling down, and both take the time to document sources and explain why you should give a shit about these particular numbers (for example, click on any of the “historical details” links on Russell’s dashboard).

economic indicators dashboardAP economic stress index

A beautiful data visualization of retail sales by type of business. I usually hate stacked bar charts because you really can’t compare what’s happening to any stack except the bottom and the total. The WSJ solves that problem by letting you click on any individual sector, which smoothly animates into a chart of just those bars. Well done! It would be interesting to see this done for the components of GDP.

Interactive Bar chart of retail shopping by category from WSJ

Update: Philip Izzo pointed out to me that the WSJ’s interactive area chart of the Fed’s balance sheet (below) also allows the same kind of drill-down. In addition, both of these are updated regularly as new data is released.

Interactive area chart of Federal Reserve balance sheet

One of my favorite summaries of economic indicators. Click on any of the “historical details” to see what each indicator means and why it’s important. Updated 9/22/10.

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The World Economic Forum has a number of interactive tools for examining the results of it’s Global Competitiveness Report. You can view the aggregate index or any of the many (very interesting) sub-components as maps, bar charts, scatter plots, rankings, or individual profiles. FYI – The United States has slipped from 2nd to 4th overall.

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Some really great financial analysis tools here.

Treemaps (for S&P, world, filter by sector, period, drill down as far as you want)

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Same info as bubbles, with roll over graphs:

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Bar, Spectrum, and other performance charts by industry, country, or capitalization:

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Tables of insider trading:

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Futures:

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Foreign Exchange:

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And a crazy filter system for stock tables:

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The Economic Policy Institute has a collection of interactive charts covering employment, GDP, and capacity utilization. There are also filters to facilitate quick comparisons across recession periods.

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Joint effort of the Brookings Institute and the Financial Times. Click on a country to open a PDF with detailed information. Or, you can look at the summary for all countries. Related Brookings post.

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