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.