Monthly GDP, retail sales, ADP employment, freight services index…
NBER BCDC key measures:
Figure 1: Nonfarm payroll (NFP) employment preliminary benchmark revision (thin blue), NFP employment (bold blue), civilian employment with smoothed population controls (bold orange), industrial production (red), personal income excluding current transfers in Ch.2017$ (bold light green), manufacturing and trade sales in Ch.2017$ (black), and monthly GDP in Ch.2017$ (pink),GDP (blue bars), all log normalized to 2025M01=0. Source: BLS via FRED, BLS, Federal Reserve, BEA 2025Q4 2nd release, S&P Global Market Insights (nee Macroeconomic Advisers, IHS Markit) (3/23/2026 release), and author’s calculations.
Figure 2: Implied Nonfarm Payroll early benchmark (NFP) (blue), civilian employment adjusted to NFP concept smoothed population controls (bold orange), manufacturing production (red), ADP private nonfarm payroll employment (light green), real retail sales, CPI deflated (black), freight services indexes (brown), and coincident index in Ch.2017$ (pink), GDO (blue bars), all log normalized to 2025M01=0. Source: BLS, ADP,via FRED, Philadelphia Fed [1], Philadelphia Fed [2], Bureau of Transportation Statistics, Federal Reserve via FRED, BEA 2025Q4 2nd release, and author’s calculations.
NYT Pitchbot: “Trump started the war in Iran to distract voters from the Epstein files. Now, he’s firing the Attorney General who released the Epstein files to distract voters from the war in Iran.”
By the way, Trump has replaced Bondi with Todd Blanche, who was Trump’s personal attorney defending him in this many criminal trials — Stormy Daniels, classified documents, election obstruction. Blanche also had the secret meetings with Ghislaine Maxwell that negotiated her silence in return for her transfer to a minimum security prison with yoga classes and and puppies.
Trump has often lamented “Where my Roy Cohn.” It seems he’s now got him, his personal lawyer as Attorney General of the United States.
In the same way that the Senate declined to confirm little Antoni to head BLS, it’s possible it will decline to confirm Blanche. He is, after all, compromised by the very thing that the felon-in-chief likes about him – he’s the felon’s lawyer, so by definition, not our lawyer.
We can hope.
Trump is currently suing the Justice Department for $100 million for the search of Mar-a-Lago for classified documents. Trump’s lawyer who filed that case against the Justice Department is Blanche, who is now acting AG for the Justice Department. So Blanche is the lawyer on both sides of the case. What are the odds that Trump gets his $100 million?