US-Macro-MCP

An MCP server that gives AI assistants clean access to US macroeconomic data — 58 indicators covering inflation, employment, growth, housing, consumer behaviour, interest rates, financial stress, markets and federal finances, sourced from the Federal Reserve's FRED database.

It is built so the assistant never has to know a FRED series ID, and never has to do arithmetic. Ask for cpi and you get the latest reading, the previous one, the year-ago value, and the percentage changes already calculated.

Changelog

What it does

Requirements

A free FRED API key. Request one at fredaccount.stlouisfed.org/apikeys — it takes about a minute and costs nothing.

Install

Claude Desktop

Add this to your claude_desktop_config.json:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "us-macro": {
      "command": "uvx",
      "args": ["us-macro-mcp"],
      "env": { "FRED_API_KEY": "your_key_here" }
    }
  }
}

Claude Code

claude mcp add us-macro --env FRED_API_KEY=your_key_here -- uvx us-macro-mcp

Any other MCP client

Run uvx us-macro-mcp with FRED_API_KEY set in the environment. The server speaks MCP over stdio.

How it behaves

It runs locally. Nothing is hosted. Your client launches the server as a subprocess on your own machine, using your own API key. No data leaves your computer except the read-only requests to FRED.

It caches. A single macro_snapshot fetches 19 indicators at once, and conversations tend to ask for the same series repeatedly. Answers are held in memory for a period matched to how often the number can actually change — an hour for daily series like Treasury yields, half a day for monthly series like CPI. The cache is discarded when the process exits. Adjust CACHE_SECONDS in fred.py if you want different behaviour.

It never logs your API key. Requests are logged as endpoint, series and status code only, and any error text is stripped of the key before it is written or returned.

Known limitations

• The ISM Manufacturing and Services PMI are not available. ISM licenses its data commercially and withdrew it from FRED. The same applies to the Conference Board Consumer Confidence Index. There is no free source for either.
• Rates are national averages, not per-bank. The 30-year mortgage rate is Freddie Mac's weekly survey across thousands of lenders — not any particular bank's advertised rate. Per-institution rates are not published free by anyone.
• FOMC meeting dates are not included. FRED publishes data release schedules, not the Federal Reserve's meeting calendar.
• Michigan consumer sentiment lags. As of this writing FRED's UMCSENT and MICH series are running about two months behind other monthly indicators. The latest_date fiel

... View full README on GitHub