Methodology

Collection

A scheduled pipeline requests each series from its source’s official API (for the current trackers, the FRED API from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis). Requests use an honest user agent, are rate limited, and respect each site’s robots.txt and terms.

The raw response is saved before anything is parsed. If a number on this site is ever questioned, the exact payload it came from can be inspected. API keys are removed from stored request URLs.

Vintages and history

Official statistics get revised. Capisaga never overwrites a stored value. When a source revises a figure, the new value is stored as a new vintage next to the old one, with the time it was retrieved. The database rejects updates and deletes on stored observations.

Charts, tables, and downloads show the latest vintage of each observation. Each stored observation records its source, the source URL, when it was retrieved, and its vintage.

Freshness

• Every series states its update frequency as reported by the source.
• Every tracker shows the date of its last observation, when the pipeline last checked the source (whether or not anything changed), and when it last stored new or revised data.
• A daily series that the pipeline has not checked for 3 days is marked stale on the page.
• Monthly and quarterly series are labelled as such and show their reporting lag. They are never described as real-time.

Pages read from the database when they are requested. Nothing on the site is updated more often than the pipeline runs.

Charts

The 1Y view plots every daily observation. Longer ranges plot weekly (5Y, 10Y) or monthly (Max) averages, computed in the database, and say so under the chart. The data table always shows exactly what is plotted. The CSV download always contains the full daily history.

Figures come from code

Every number on this site is the result of a database query run in code. An AI model never generates, estimates, or rounds a figure. Where software helps write narrative text, it only refers to figures that code supplied.

Scope

Capisaga covers economic, policy, and trade data and analysis. It makes no buy or sell recommendations on any security. It does not collect data on private individuals. Sources are listed on the sources page.