Economists Are Panicking About Economic Data From Trump

Economists, data specialists, and even some Nobel Laureates have been sounding the alarm about the economic data coming from the Trump administration. But here’s the twist – they aren’t panicking about the actual numbers coming out; they’re panicking about the fact that the numbers don’t match what everyone else is seeing. In other words, the people who do this for a living are telling us that the administration is cooking the books to make things look better than they actually are. Ring of Fire’s Farron Cousins explains what’s happening.

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*This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos.

Over the last several weeks of the month of July, Reuters has been conducting a poll. That poll was conducted among economists, data specialists, Nobel Laureates, and all kinds of people who deal with statistics from the federal government as part of their daily jobs. Hobbs. And according to the 100 people that Reuters talked to for this poll, again, conducted over several weeks, 89 out of a hundred of them. So 89% were concerned about the quality of official US economic data. 41 said that they were very concerned, but 89% say we are concerned about the quality of data coming out of the Trump administration. Let me explain to you what that means. These economists, Nobel Laureates, data specialists, everybody, they weren't talking about how bad the data was that just came out. They're actually talking about the exact opposite. They're talking about how bad it is that data is, of course not coming out.

Second quarter of the year ended at the end of June. We are now just a couple days away from the end of July. Where's our reports? Where's our second quarter data? Because that second quarter data, depending on how bad it is, if it shows another, uh, quarter of negative GDP we're officially in a recession, that data should have been out by now. But it's not. That's what these economists are talking about. They know that this administration is intentionally missing data deadlines that every other administration prior to them has clearly met, easily met. Yes, there been revisions sometimes because they get data out hastily, but they've met the deadlines. The Trump administration is not doing that. In other words, 89% of these very smart people who do this for a living are telling us this administration is hiding the data and most likely altering it to make them look better.

MSNBC's. Steve Benin wrote in an article earlier this month, he said that the prospect of corruption and political mischief interfering with the federal statistics under Trump is also worth keeping in mind. Perhaps Donald Trump, the argument goes, might use his influence to tell the labor department to manipulate the data and deceive the public. There's been no evidence of statistics being altered to fit a political narrative so far. However, go ahead and argue that point there with you, Steve, back in March. In fact, on March 2nd, as it were, Howard Lutnick actually came out in an interview and said, we're gonna change the way, or at least we want to change the way that we calculate GDP. We wanna get rid, take out the government spending part of it, right? Because if

Government spending shrinks, that would mean the GDP would go down, right? Oh, and we don't wanna show that even though the US government is the largest spender in the country, you know, and they, they support millions and millions of jobs, even many more millions through the, you know, indirect jobs. But they want to take that out because they wanna shrink government spending, and that would shrink GDP. So this administration, Howard Lutnick, March 2nd, by the way, they've already admitted, we're gonna cook the books, we're gonna change the way you get the data. We're gonna change the way we calculate the data in a way that's more favorable to us. Now, I guess technically, to Benin's point, has it happened yet? We don't know, but we can't say that it hasn't happened either. So it's one of those, you know, kind of is, is the cat in the box alive or is the cat dead? We don't know until we open the box, but the Republicans, Donald Trump is not giving us the box to open it up. So we don't know if they've cooked the data or we don't know if the data is what it is, because they're not even giving us the data.