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 standardized 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.

Changed in v2.2.0: the GMDB source previously returned percentage points (5.13 for 5.13%) while the OECD source returned a decimal fraction. The GMDB series is now divided by 100 so both sources agree; divide any hard-coded comparison by 100.

Also known as: 3-month rate, money market rate, short-term yield.

Short Term Interest Rate in Python

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')

economics.get_short_term_interest_rate(
    countries=['Japan', 'United States', 'China'],
    gmdb_source=False,
    period='quarterly'
)

Which returns:

Parameters

The function accepts the following parameters:

• countries (list[str] | str | None, optional): The countries to include in the data. Defaults to None.
• period (str | None, optional): Whether to return the monthly, quarterly or the annual data.
• gmdb_source (bool | None, optional): Whether to get the data from the Global Macro Database (GMDB).
• rolling (int, optional): The rolling window size to use for smoothing the data (simple moving average). Defaults to None.
• trailing (int, optional): The trailing window size to use for summing the data over trailing periods (e.g. a trailing-4-quarter sum). Defaults to None.
• growth (bool, optional): Whether to return the growth data or the actual data.
• lag (int, optional): The number of periods to lag the data by.
• standardize (bool, optional): Whether to standardize (Z-Score) the result. When combined with growth=True, standardizes the growth values instead of the raw values. Defaults to False.
• rounding (int | None, optional): The number of decimals to round the results to. Defaults to None.

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