There are two objectives for this assignment. The first is to demonstrate that you can find economic data for the US economy. The second is to demonstrate that you can graph the data in such a manner that we can tell something from the graph. Both of these are things that economists do all the time.

The US government collects massive amounts of data on the economy. Most of it is available on the internet. Some of the major sites include:

Bureau of Economic Analysis:http://www.bea.gov/

Federal Reserve Economic Data - FRED II:http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/

Bureau of Labor Statistics:http://www.bls.gov/

US Census Bureau:http://www.census.gov/

1. Find quarterly data* for Real Gross Domestic Productand its major componentsin chained 2012 dollars for the years 2007 through 2011. List the data for Real GDP (Y), Real Personal consumption expenditures (C), Real Gross private domestic investment (I), Real Net exports of goods and services (NX), and Real Government consumption expenditures and gross investment (G).

2. Graph the data.

3. Identify the last recession on the graph. (Note that a recession has both a starting date and an ending date. If you can't annotate it on the graph, give me the dates in your submission text)

4. Go look around at the data available at the sites listed above. Graph any other government collected economic data for the last 5 years that is of interest to you. (5 points) Include your data source. (If it is annual data, include at least 10 years. For quarterly or monthly data, 5 years is fine.)

You may want to use Excel for this assignment. Some of the data sites will graph the data for you if you can figure out how - they are all different. (All of the data sources change at seemingly random intervals.)

You may submit multiple files. I generally am unable to open certain spreadsheet files from Apple software. Excel on Apple works fine but other things are iffy. Please use something else.For graphics files, JPEG and PNG work well. D2L (MyCourses) tends to hang trying to display SVG files. Avoid those.

Another resource is the National Bureau of Economic Research:http://www.nber.org/It is the organization that dates the business cycle for the US.