A loyal reader asks: Please don’t think less of me, but I am absolutely totally bored by economics. So imagine my joy when my boss asked me, yes me, track economic data to crosstab (not literally) with our business trends. I don’t know where to turn. And make it easy, please. I don’t have the stomach for this.

Seriously, this is nothing to fret about. Check out Economagic.

It’s a breeze. And you’ll look smart as a whip.

You’ll find free, easily available economic time series data useful for economic research. It provides easy access to large amounts of data, and you can quickly get charts of that data. There are more than 200,000 time series for which data and custom charts can be retrieved.

The majority of the data is USA data. The core data sets involve US macroeconomic data (that is, for the whole US), but the bulk of the data is employment data by local area — state, county, MSA, and many cities and towns.

Now go be a star!