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US Economic Indicators

Answer questions about long-run and current US economic indicators with cited government data.

Source Download skill
Repository
danielmiessler/LifeOS
Stars
19,682
Licence
MIT
Files
14 files

What it does

This skill lets an AI agent answer questions about the US economy using official government statistics. It can query a long-run almanac of annual indicators (economy, debt, cost of living and more, many back to the 1940s) to say whether a trend is getting better or worse, and it can pull current figures such as GDP, inflation, unemployment, mortgage rates and gas prices from FRED, EIA and Treasury data. Answers name the publisher of each figure and note when data is preliminary or stale.

Great for

  • Analysts or students who want cited US trend data without manual downloads
  • Journalists checking whether a US indicator is improving or worsening
  • Anyone wanting a multi-timeframe overview of the current US economy

Skip it if

  • Personal finance or investment decisions, since the skill is not designed for them and its figures are national aggregates
  • Pathogen or health surveillance, which the skill's own description excludes
  • Rebuilding or publishing the almanac site or refreshing other data sites, which are out of scope and could cause unintended file changes if attempted

Try asking

  • “How is the US economy doing right now?”
  • “Is US inflation getting better or worse over the last decade?”
  • “Refresh the US metrics data from FRED and EIA”
  • “Is the usstats data fresh compared with its source datasets?”
Step-by-step guide: how to use US Economic IndicatorsInstall, first run, examples, tips and FAQs

Install in 3 steps

  1. 1

    Download the skill

    The ZIP contains the 14 original files, the MIT licence and an attribution note.

    USStats.zip
  2. 2

    Add it to your agent

    Claude Code (all projects)

    mkdir -p ~/.claude/skills && unzip USStats.zip -d ~/.claude/skills/

    Claude Code / Agent SDK (this project only)

    mkdir -p .claude/skills && unzip USStats.zip -d .claude/skills/

    Claude apps (web/desktop): Settings → Capabilities → Skills → Upload skill, and choose the ZIP.

  3. 3

    Ask for the task

    No special command needed — the agent reads the skill's description and loads it when your request matches. Try one of the prompts above.

Get better results

  • Set up FRED and EIA keys first using Setup.md, and keep them out of shared files.
  • Ask for a specific indicator and timeframe to get clearer, better-cited answers.
  • Review any answer that makes a causal claim, since the skill itself warns that correlation is not causation.

What's inside

  • Intents/Analyze.md
  • Intents/GetCurrentState.md
  • Intents/SyncCheck.md
  • Intents/UpdateData.md
  • Setup.md
  • SKILL.md
  • Tools/FetchFredSeries.help.md
  • Tools/FetchFredSeries.ts
  • Tools/GenerateAnalysis.help.md
  • Tools/GenerateAnalysis.ts
  • Tools/UpdateSubstrateMetrics.help.md
  • Tools/UpdateSubstrateMetrics.ts
  • Tools/UsStats.ts
  • Tools/UsStatsConfig.ts

Redistributed unmodified from danielmiessler/LifeOS under the MIT licence. The assessment was drafted with AI from the skill's files on 2026-10-29. Skills can instruct your agent to run code — read SKILL.md and any scripts before installing.