I have no time for Trump - but go and look at the track record for the BLS over the last couple of years - pretty much beat expectations every month and the quietly downgrade the previous months - its very poor
I am well aware of that, but that is not the point.
The point is that Trump politicises the data, and the next step is to put someone in charge who will ‘filter’ the data.
Revising your data downward a couple of months later is one thing, but never revising it knowing it is wrong gets us to China, where nobody believes the official statistics.
And don’t forget that the job of the Fed is to manage inflation and unemployment, both of which are collected by the BLS. If that data is wrong (or ‘filtered’), it opens up the possibility of manipulating the Fed.
Or, if the Fed loses its independence, the Fed can use ‘filtered’ BLS data to enact the monetary policy the President wants.
This is why I have linked to the Erdogan case. He did the same, eventually putting a confidant (I think his son-in-law, but I am not sure) in office as head of the central bank so he could enact Erdogan’s theory that lower interest rates create lower inflation. It all ended with >80% inflation and a crash of the Turkish Lira and the Turkish bond market.
And I don’t want to go down that road with the US Treasury market.
Ok but explain how when this was done under Biden the MAGAs said it was to make Biden look GOOD (initial reports higher and 'sneaking' in revised numbers lower) but when EXACT same thing happens under Trump, its to make him look bad? Make it make sense.
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I have no time for Trump - but go and look at the track record for the BLS over the last couple of years - pretty much beat expectations every month and the quietly downgrade the previous months - its very poor
I am well aware of that, but that is not the point.
The point is that Trump politicises the data, and the next step is to put someone in charge who will ‘filter’ the data.
Revising your data downward a couple of months later is one thing, but never revising it knowing it is wrong gets us to China, where nobody believes the official statistics.
And don’t forget that the job of the Fed is to manage inflation and unemployment, both of which are collected by the BLS. If that data is wrong (or ‘filtered’), it opens up the possibility of manipulating the Fed.
Or, if the Fed loses its independence, the Fed can use ‘filtered’ BLS data to enact the monetary policy the President wants.
This is why I have linked to the Erdogan case. He did the same, eventually putting a confidant (I think his son-in-law, but I am not sure) in office as head of the central bank so he could enact Erdogan’s theory that lower interest rates create lower inflation. It all ended with >80% inflation and a crash of the Turkish Lira and the Turkish bond market.
And I don’t want to go down that road with the US Treasury market.
Ok but explain how when this was done under Biden the MAGAs said it was to make Biden look GOOD (initial reports higher and 'sneaking' in revised numbers lower) but when EXACT same thing happens under Trump, its to make him look bad? Make it make sense.