Why Did S&P Data Just Disappear From The Best Economics Website In The World?

Stop the presses.

The St. Louis Fed Reserve just put out a release saying on April 25th, all series from "S&P Dow Jones Indices LLC will be removed from FRED, ALFRED, and GeoFRED."

Here's what we'll be missing out on. 1. 4 series of Dow Jones Averages 2. 179 series of S&P/Case-Shiller Home Price Indices and 3. The S&P 500 stock price index.

"These series will also no longer be available through the Excel Add-in, mobile apps, and API or any other FRED services we provide. Links to these series or graphs that contain these series may be broken or return unexpected results," according to the press release.

"For some time now the St. Louis Fed has been publishing historical data without license from us," Dave Guarino, head of communications at S&P Dow Jones Indices told Business Insider.

Guarino said they had "negotiated back and forth for some time" with the St. Louis Fed and that S&P Dow Jones Indices considers the data to be their intellectual property right that was being published without their permission.

Guarino says they last reached out to the St. Louis Fed sometime at the end of February and asked them to finalize the agreement in sixty days.

We're still waiting for a comment from the St. Louis Fed.

We at Business Insider and other bloggers who rely on FRED for their charts are bummed about it. FRED is arguably the best economics website largely because it pulls in over a 140,000 data series and then lets you chart them as you like.