FRED Macro Regime Shift Alerts with OpenAI GPT & Slack

Get weekly FRED macro regime shift alerts to Slack—powered by OpenAI

This n8n workflow automatically reviews selected macroeconomic series from a FRED MCP server every Monday, detects regime changes versus last week, then uses OpenAI to generate a business-specific interpretation and posts a formatted brief to Slack.

What this workflow does

• Runs weekly (Mondays) or on manual run, loading configuration such as the mcp_url, the list of FRED series to watch, and your business context.
• Checks FRED MCP availability by calling the MCP server to list available tools and stopping if required endpoints are missing.
• Compares this week to last week by reading prior values and regimes from an n8n Data Table named macro_watch.
• Pulls series metadata and recent observations from the FRED MCP server in parallel, then scores each series “shape” (including streaks, quarter move, and z-score) to assign a regime label.
• Builds derived macro signals using multiple series (including the 10Y–2Y spread, the Sahm rule gap, and a real policy rate), and checks whether each regime changed vs last week.
• Upserts weekly readings back into macro_watch and, if any regime changed, requests a short OpenAI interpretation and posts the full brief to a Slack channel.

Use cases

• SaaS operators monitoring macro shifts that may impact demand, hiring, or pricing decisions.
• Automation engineers building a reliable FRED-to-Slack reporting pipeline with regime-change intelligence.
• Teams that want a consistent weekly macro “brief” without manually checking charts.

Technical details

• Integrations: FRED via fred-economic-mcp, OpenAI (Chat model), and Slack.
• n8n nodes used: if, set, code, no op, merge, and slack.
• Data storage: n8n Data Table macro_watch with columns series_id, seen_on, value, and regime.