Short Term Interest Rate
Short-term interest rates are the rates at which short-term borrowings are effected between financial institutions or the rate at which short-term government paper is issued or traded in the market. Short-term interest rates are generally averages of daily rates, measured as a percentage.
Short-term interest rates are based on three-month money market rates where available. Typical standardised names are “money market rate” and “treasury bill rate”. The OECD source specifically returns the 3-month interbank offered rate.
See definition: https://data.oecd.org/interest/short-term-interest-rates.htm
It is also possible to get the data from the Global Macro Database (GMDB) by setting the gmdb_source to True.
Both sources return the rate as a decimal fraction per annum (0.0513 for 5.13%), so the two are directly interchangeable. Only the OECD source supports monthly and quarterly frequency; the GMDB is annual only, so the period argument has no effect when gmdb_source is True.
Also known as: 3-month rate, money market rate, short-term yield.
Short Term Interest Rate in Python or via the MCP
Install the Finance Toolkit with:
pip install financetoolkit -U
Then call get_short_term_interest_rate as shown below.
from financetoolkit import Economics
economics = Economics(start_date='2023-05-01', end_date="2025-12-31")
economics.get_short_term_interest_rate(
countries=['Japan', 'United States', 'China'],
gmdb_source=False,
period='quarterly'
)
Or, after setting up the Finance Toolkit MCP, ask:
How did 3-month interbank rates in Japan, the United States and China move each quarter from the second quarter of 2023 to the fourth quarter of 2025?
Which returns:
| Japan | United States | China | |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2023Q2 | -0.0001 | 0.0513 | 0.0289 |
| 2023Q3 | 0.0001 | 0.0543 | 0.0261 |
| 2023Q4 | 0.0002 | 0.054 | 0.0288 |
| 2024Q1 | 0.0005 | 0.0526 | 0.0267 |
| 2024Q2 | 0.0013 | 0.0531 | 0.0235 |
| 2024Q3 | 0.0023 | 0.051 | 0.021 |
| 2024Q4 | 0.0033 | 0.0454 | 0.0205 |
| 2025Q1 | 0.0079 | 0.0432 | 0.0202 |
| 2025Q2 | 0.0078 | 0.0431 | 0.0188 |
| 2025Q3 | 0.0079 | 0.042 | 0.0171 |
| 2025Q4 | 0.009 | 0.0386 | 0.0168 |
Parameters
get_short_term_interest_rate accepts the following parameters.
| Parameter | Type | Description | Example |
|---|---|---|---|
countries | list[str] | str | None | The countries to include in the data. Defaults to None. | ["United States", "Germany"] |
period | str | None | Whether to return the monthly, quarterly or the annual data. Defaults to None, which is quarterly when the Economics class was initialized with quarterly=True and monthly otherwise. | "quarterly" |
gmdb_source | bool | None | Whether to get the data from the Global Macro Database (GMDB). | False |
rolling | int | The rolling window size to use for smoothing the data (simple moving average). Defaults to None. | 4 |
trailing | int | The trailing window size to use for summing the data over trailing periods (e.g. a trailing-4-quarter sum). Defaults to None. | 4 |
growth | bool | Whether to return the growth data or the actual data. Defaults to False. | True |
lag | int | The number of periods to lag the data by. Defaults to 1. | 4 |
standardize | bool | Whether to standardize (Z-Score) the result. When combined with growth=True, standardizes the growth values instead of the raw values. Defaults to False. | True |
rounding | int | None | The number of decimals to round the results to. Defaults to None. | 2 |
gmdb_forecasts | bool | Whether to include the years the Global Macro Database projects, from the IMF’s World Economic Outlook, up to five years ahead. Only applies to data from the Global Macro Database. Defaults to False, which ends a series with its last observation. | True |