R code

The R script below will generate it (using my darklyplot package’s theme_dark2 function). The charts uses ggridges to generate the binlines/little histograms.

library(tidyverse)
library(ggridges)
library(darklyplot)
library(lubridate)
df <- 
  tidyquant::tq_get("MORTGAGE30US",get="economic.data") %>%
  mutate(pmms30=price,year=year(date)) %>%
  mutate(yearf=factor(year))

ggplot(data=filter(df,year>2009),
       aes(y=forcats::fct_reorder(yearf,-year),
           x=pmms30,group=forcats::fct_reorder(yearf,-year),
           fill=yearf))+
  geom_density_ridges2(color="white",size=0.2,
                       alpha=0.85,scale=0.75, 
                       stat="binline",
                       binwidth=0.125)+
  geom_text(stat = "bin",
            aes(y = group + 0.9*(..count../max(..count..)),
                label = ifelse(..count..>0, ..count.., "")
                ),
            vjust = 0.2, size = 4, color = "white", binwidth = 0.125) +
  geom_vline(data= .%>% filter(date==max(date)), linetype=2, color="white",aes(xintercept=pmms30))+
  scale_fill_viridis_d(option="C")+
  scale_color_viridis_d(option="C")+
  scale_x_continuous(limits=c(2,6),breaks=seq(2,6,0.25))+
  theme_dark2(base_family="Arial",base_size=12)+
  theme(panel.grid.minor=element_blank(),
        legend.position="none",
        plot.title=element_text(size=rel(1.5),face="bold"),
        plot.subtitle=element_text(size=rel(1.3),face="italic"),
        panel.grid.major.x=element_blank())+
  labs(x="30-year fixed mortgage rate (%)\n",
       y="Year",
       caption=paste0("@lenkiefer Source: Freddie Mac Primary Mortgage Market Survey,",
                      "\nDotted line at ",
                      df[df$date==max(df$date),]$pmms30,"% average for week of ",
                      as.character(max(df$date), format="%B %d, %Y")),
       title="Distribution over weekly mortgage rates by year",
       subtitle="Histograms fit to weekly observations for each year\n")