As one of the 12 regional Reserve banks in the Fed System, the St. Louis Fed is central to America's economy. All of the Reserve banks share some degree of similar duties. But because the banks are independent of one another, each has some specialized assignments and tasks that distinguish it. The Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis maintains one of the world's most comprehensive online economic databases (FRED). FRED is a database of over 55,000 economic time series from 45 sources. With FRED, users can download data in Microsoft Excel and text formats and view charts of data series.