I was slow to the outrage about the floated idea of stopping the publication of the monthly Jobs report (in favour of just the quarterly numbers). It now appears that E.J. Antoni has walked away from that suggestion.
Backing down is hardly unexpected. From the point of view of politics, economics data just seems to be a nuisance when it goes the wrong way, and shutting it off does not matter. But for people who are paid to discuss the economy, in the absence of data, there is nothing useful to do. As a result widespread push back from economists in finance and financial media to data cuts are inevitable.
The main real threat to American statistics is that data collection is defunded. Although there is the chance that President Trump could install loyalists to doctor data, the problem is that most loyalists lack the quantitative skills fabricate an economics report that contains a lot of internally-consistent numbers.
To be honest, I would not be greatly concerned about the demise of the monthly Nonfarm Payrolls (NFP) Report. Although cutting a report for political reasons is ominous, I dislike the non-random sample, and waiting for the quarterly data report for more robust data would not be disastrous. The Household Survey would be more of a loss. Although the data are noisy (one of the attractions of the NFP is its artificial lack of volatility), the Household survey offers very useful information about the composition of the working population (e.g., how many people are not looking for jobs?) which is not gained by asking employers how many employees they have. The risk to the Household Report is the secular decline in survey response rates and budget cuts.
Once tariff effects bite, it is extremely likely that President Trump will want to take a Sharpie™️to the inflation data. However, such a move could easily be politically suicidal, since his base is filled with inflation nutters who think the data are fabricated already. The latest inflation numbers saw an uptick in the 3-month rate of change, which is unsurprising. Although the 3-month rate of change numbers might sound punchy as stand-alone statistics, annualised quarterly price data are volatile, and a chart over a long horizon will contain a lot of jumps, with the pandemic period being particular wild. I will probably do a discussion if and when the tariff effects are noticeably moving the 12-month rate of change.
Otherwise, I do not have much to say, other than to note that I am puttering around with my inflation manuscript. It was always unclear how to react to recent events, but I am largely throwing in the towel on trying to have the text reflect conditions when publication will happen (which is not immediate).
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(c) Brian Romanchuk 2024
