The wider economy: macro, rates and credit

Why this matters. Roughly a third of what we sell is not the price of anything listed, and it is the third most people here cannot describe. That gap shows in front of exactly the clients who pay the most. Foundation: The rate that rules them all

Equities are the loud part of the shelf. Underneath sit three families that describe the conditions every listed price reacts to.

Macro

Indicators by country — the published series for growth, inflation, employment and the rest — and an economic events calendar of what is scheduled to be released and when. Together they answer "what is the state of this economy" and "what is the market waiting to hear".

Rates

The most misunderstood family, and the one with the most endpoints:

• Policy rates — what central banks have set: Fed funds, the ECB, the Bank of England, and the reference rates that anchor the rest.
• Reference rates — including SOFR, the benchmarks contracts are actually written against.
• US Treasury curves — yield rates, bill rates, long-term rates, and real yields with inflation taken out. This is where the yield curve comes from, and the yield curve is the chart most macro conversations end up in front of: what the yield curve is saying.
• Funding stress — spreads that show whether short-term money is moving freely or seizing up.

Credit

Who might not pay, and what the market charges for that risk:

• Sovereign credit ratings, default spreads and risk premium — the country layer.
• Sovereign and market CDS spreads — the price of insuring against default, which in the market moves faster than any rating agency. The sovereign table we carry is an annual snapshot, though, so it records the level, not the speed.
• Corporate high-quality market yields and a corporate market distress index — the company layer of the same question.

Why this family sells

A portfolio analytics product cannot discount a future cash flow without a rate. A risk tool cannot say anything about a bond without a curve and a spread. A research desk covering emerging markets lives in sovereign risk. These clients are not asking for a nice-to-have, and if we cannot describe the family they will assume we do not have it.

Try it now

Name the family and one endpoint for each of these four before reading on, then read the answers each call gives and see whether you were right.

1. "What is the current Fed funds rate?" — Rates. /rates/policy-rates, filtered with filter[country]=US&filter[code]=FED_TARGET_UPPER for the top of the range.

2. "Is Italy's default risk rising?" — Credit. /credit-risk/sovereign/cds-spreads, with /credit-risk/sovereign/credit-ratings beside it, both filtered by the ISO3 code ITA. Read meta.frequency before you promise anything: these two are annual snapshots, one row per country, so they say how Italy is rated and priced as of their date, not whether that is rising. A client asking about direction needs two years side by side or a daily source, and saying so is part of the answer.

3. "When is the next US inflation print?" — Macro. /economic-events?from=2026-09-01&to=2026-09-30&country=US for the calendar, and /macro-indicator/USA for the published series itself.

4. "What does the US yield curve look like today?" — Rates. /ust/yield-rates, and read the shape of the response carefully: it returns one row per date and tenor, so a single day's curve is fourteen rows rather than one.

5. Now the question behind the questions. A portfolio tool cannot discount a future cash flow without a rate, and a risk tool cannot say anything about a bond without a curve and a spread. Write the sentence you would use when a client asks whether we have "macro data" — naming a family and a path beats naming a category.