From EJ Antoni, announcing on X, joining Truflation:
BIG NEWS: I’ve argued for years that our economic statistics need modernization. Government data collection methods are slow, narrow, and often disconnected from the real economy.
…
As someone who cares deeply about sound policy and economic truth, I believe technologies like Truflation represent the future of how we measure and understand our economy – that’s why I joined their efforts to create private sector solutions to public sector failures.
OK, well, just remember this is the guy who said the recession (which he has not yet called as having ended) started in 2022 (or was it mid-2024 — he called that one too). He applied (apparently) a (undocumented) consumption price deflator to all of GDP, he pointed to no increase in the import price deflator as proof that tariffs hadn’t raised prices (not realizing the import price deflator doesn’t include tariffs), used highly volatile household survey data to argue that government employment was the basis for overall employment increase. He also asserted that the last preliminary benchmark revision showed the Labor Department “quietly cutting employment growth by half”, when heck, the BLS does a preliminary benchmark revision EVERY YEAR. Best yet, he claimed the two-consecutive quarter negative growth rate had been the definition of recession for a hundred years, when at the time, BEA quarterly data only went back 75 years!
I feel sorry for Truflation — not that I really understood the documentation for Truflation’s inflation index, when it existed. Indeed, I can’t find anything now but this webpage. The fact that the only table in the webpage is mistitled (it indicates “ONS” index when it’s the “BLS” index that is compared to the Truflation index does not engender a lot of confidence).
Detailed documentation here for all his other errors in this post.
Links busted.
What’s a “strategic advisor”? Any strategy which relies on advice from a bullplop artist is going to be a bullplop strategy. Intentionally so.
Is this just a way to get little Antoni a paycheck so he can keep writing bullplop? I ask in part because Truflation’s founder is also a crypto guy, Stefan Rust.
If the TRUMP administration cares so much about the quality of economic statistics then why did it kill Federal Economic Statistics Advisory Committee? – (FESAC) (see https://apps.bea.gov/fesac/ ). It looks like the next grift is in private companies to create economic statistics that the government should be producing.
This is the clown that Trump hopes to use to pressure Chairman Powell to lower rates?
I have to assume that Antoni’s primary job is to make sure the agency numbers find their way to friend and family before the official release.
Here is a link to truflation’s US inflation index:
https://truflation.com/marketplace/us-inflation-rate
Haven’t read it recently, but I recall it was similar to the Billion Prices Project.
I imagine this hire was to put them in T—-p’s good graces, but it will cause me to suspect their data going forward.
Speaking of improving economic statistics, this is a release from Trump’s press secretary Karoline Leavitt:
“President Trump’s bold economic agenda is delivering real results for American Families — with new data from Doordash’s State of Local Commerce report confirming that inflation has been tamed, everyday prices are beginning to drop, and wages are growing.”
It seems we have sub-contracted economic statistics to gig company Doordash.
You have a situation where private data sources are incentivized to report favorable data in order to get an advertising endorsement from the White House. They can’t be trusted. Everything related to Trump is a transaction.
Big layoff announcements have been a feature of the U.S. labor market this year, with warnings from labor specialists that layoff announcements at this year’s pace typically presage recession. Once upon a time, BLS reported on mass layoff announcements, but stopped in 2013. Ending mass layoff reporting was one of the program cuts BLS used to meet PAYGO budget sequestration requirements. (The coming round of small hospital closures will be another PAYGO event, the result of the Big Bloated Budget Bill.)
The data used to track mass layoffs are still collected, as required by the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act of 1988. For anyone who’s curious, the data are available here:
https://www.warntracker.com/
A data subscription from WARN.com costs $250/month, so I won’t be a subscriber. You can grab some mass layoff data from the website, but its not concenient.
Ok let’s keep an open mind about the “recession started in 2022” claim. Of course looking at employment or GDP the recession claim doesn’t make sense. But is it possible that the real income of the median American fell significantly since 2020? That would explain the gut feeling (since the CARES act I, II, etc. ended in 2022) of many that we’ve been in a recession.
In other words, while the claim is not technically true, most people might be hurting like in a recession.
Three observations:
1- Weekly household nominal earnings growth (30%):
– food (30% since 2020: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CUUR0000SAF11)
– shelter (30% since 2020: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CUUR0000SAS2RS)
– energy (40% since 2020: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CUSR0000SAH21)
– car insurance (27% since 2020: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/PCU5241265241261)
(Meanwhile “full time: Median usual weekly nominal earnings” was up only 25% (https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LEU0252881500Q), while part-time and gig work are on the rise.)
2- Basket of expenses for median household might not track the CPI. This would be coherent with the historically low share of labor income vs capital income. If the GDP deflator is biased, so is “Real Median Household Income” measurement, which would hide a decline in real household income.
Looking at the numbers in (1), a decline of 5% in purchasing power since 2020 is plausible. Many households entered 2020 with a savings rate below 5%, so if this is true, they’re squeezed today. Does anyone have access to a “median household savings rate” time series? I wouldn’t be surprised to see it around 0% today, consumer debt and defaults (https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/DRCLACBS) are rising since 2022. “US Auto Loans Delinquent by 90 or More Days” has been rising since 2022.
3- Employment counts people that worked a single hour last week. We might be undercounting the number of “involuntary part-time workers”. There might be a gig economy effect not counted in the “part-time for economics reasons” series too.
Keep in mind these figures look at the median household and doesn’t tell how many people can afford less than 5 years ago (is it 40% or 80%?), and doesn’t account for household size, demographics, etc. I wish we had access to better time series per income decile for these stats.
The conclusion of all that would be that *for most households*, a personal recession started in 2022. Please tell me I’m wrong. 😉
Optimistic but Skeptic: I wouldn’t necessarily say wrong, but not sure real median income fits your story. See https://motioresearch.com/household-income-series/
I can think of 2 questions:
– Is CPI representative of inflation for the median household? (I hope so, otherwise the “real median household income” is biased.)
– What does CPI look like for the “market basket” of a household in the 25th, 75th, 99th percentile?
I’m asking because in a context where the top 10% of income does 50% of consumption the “average” CPI and “median” income might not represent the distribution of economic pain.
(I wish we did economics (for policy discussion purposes) more with whole distributions, and less with just averages and medians.)
Optimistic but Sceptic: See this blogpost, and associated links.
My attempt to do quintile appropriate deflation in this post.
Thanks, is this quintile nominal revenue / CPI?
I still think we need different CPI “baskets” for each quintile to be able to do a fair comparaison of economic success VS pain.
Optimistic but Sceptic: To be specific, I use 2nd quintile wage growth divided by 2nd quintile CPI, in Figure 2 of this previously referenced post.