Petro said a lot of things in a maniac tirade:
He’s trying to save face, just doesn’t know how to do it.
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That’s…an awful lot to say in response to merely trying to fly Columbians back to Columbia.
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Jan’25 CPI +0.5% or 6% annualized rate, very hot numbers
- CPI m/m: ACTUAL 0.5% - Expecting 0.3%
- CPI y/y: ACTUAL 3% - Expecting 2.9%
- CPI Core m/m: ACTUAL 0.4% - Expecting 0.3%
- CPI Core y/y: ACTUAL 3.3% - Expecting 3.1
Markets down, rate cuts pushed off
- S&P 500 FUTURES FALL 1% AFTER CPI RISES MORE THAN ESTIMATED
- TRADERS SHIFT NEXT FED RATE CUT TO DECEMBER FROM SEPTEMBER
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Last January CPI (2024) was also worse than expectations. Not sure why expectation seem to always undershoot actual inflation in Jan. Either way, Fed doesn’t have much room unless they go full Volcker like in the 80s.
And that’s also high inflation even before tariffs take effect… Not looking good to me in short term.
Thankfully the numbers should look better once DOGE fixes the Dept. of Labor statistics… 
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That will be one of their missions, no doubt. The deep state is behind these numbers. /s
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These are not inflation numbers but employment numbers from the government. How do you explain this massive revision if they are not cooked?
These revisions have occurred under different administrations. The “deep state” is a figment of one side’s imagination, not both sides.
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Haven’t we explored this numerous times already? Do we keep having to prove the same negatives?
Two revisions are always planned. The first release (roughly the first week of the following month) is an estimate based on 60k random household surveys which the BLS deems representative (aka free of known sampling bias). With this small a sample (0.03% of the 167M US workforce), you should be surprised if there was consistently no revision. Just use a sample size calculator to confirm.
At the BLS desired confidence level, the expected error of the BLS method for a 4-5% unemployment level and population size of 167M is roughly +/-0.3%. To me that’s roughly in line with published revisions.
But you can check the track record too: BLS revision method and stats
Personally, I can’t find a pattern proving that the BLS consistently overestimates or underestimates unemployment regardless of administration.
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Though the title “Voters Were Right About the Economy. The Data Was Wrong.” is slightly clickbaity and the explanation shouldn’t surprise anyone here, I still thought it was an interesting read.
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2025/02/11/democrats-tricked-strong-economy-00203464
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Thanks, good read. Basically there’s a big divergence between the “average” (which skews towards representing the rich, whether in spending or wages or employment) and the circumstances of the “median” or marginal mid-to-lower class American and things got a lot worse for the lower end of the scale in terms of wage growth, impact of inflation, etc.
for 20 years or more, including the months prior to the election, voter perception was more reflective of reality than the incumbent statistics. Our research revealed that the data collected by the various agencies is largely accurate… but the filters used to compute the headline statistics are flawed. As a result, they paint a much rosier picture of reality than bears out on the ground.
CPI also perceives reality through a very rosy looking glass. Those with modest incomes purchase only a fraction of the 80,000 goods the CPI tracks, spending a much greater share of their earnings on basics like groceries, health care and rent. And that, of course, affects the overall figure: If prices for eggs, insurance premiums and studio apartment leases rise at a faster clip than those of luxury goods and second homes, the CPI underestimates the impact of inflation on the bulk of Americans. That, of course, is exactly what has happened.
[our alternative cpi] focuses on the measurements of prices charged for basic necessities… Our alternative indicator reveals that, since 2001, the cost of living for Americans with modest incomes has risen 35 percent faster than the CPI. Put another way: The resources required simply to maintain the same working-class lifestyle over the last two decades have risen much more dramatically than we’ve been led to believe.
When our more targeted measure of inflation is set atop our more accurate measure of weekly earnings, it immediately becomes clear that purchasing power fell at the median by 4.3 percent in 2023.
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Thanks. I was too lazy to copy-pasta the highlights.
They’re definitely onto something although finding better statistics is not as simple as the author claims.
If you filter the statistic to include as unemployed people who can’t find anything but part-time work or who make a poverty wage (roughly $25,000), the percentage is actually 23.7 percent.
How do you differentiate people who voluntarily work part-time or do freelance work from those who cannot find full time employment even though they’d like it? How do you separate the people who are not looking for work at all - say homemakers, FIRE - from those who have given up looking, or those who don’t care to even look (NEETs)? If you simply divide full time workers by all adults 18-70, yeah the unemployment picture is probably gonna look much worse but it’s not gonna be more accurate either.
My colleagues and I have modeled an alternative indicator, one that excludes many of the items that only the well-off tend to purchase — and tend to have more stable prices over time — and focuses on the measurements of prices charged for basic necessities, the goods and services that lower- and middle-income families typically can’t avoid.
That seems fair as an additional CPI measure, just like the BLS has already have slightly different baskets of goods for the CPI-W or CPI-E. We already have core CPI to exclude food and energy, it shouldn’t be too hard to have a CPI-B for bare necessities of all households.
The argument against GDP as a reliable measure of national productivity seems slightly unfair though. There will always be geographical differences and education-based differences. AI’s probably gonna disrupt this as well. But authors just complain GDP is not granular enough without offering any alternative.
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Asked for more specifics on what USDA might consider in combatting these issues with the dueling threats of inflation and avian flu, Rollins suggested possible biosecurity measures as well as efforts to repopulate farmers’ flocks.
“We’re looking at every tool in the toolkit including biosecurity measures,” Rollins told Breitbart News. “There are some successful models out there that the USDA is implementing on a much smaller scale. Maybe with all of the cancellation of DEI programs, and we can talk about DOGE too, but identifying additional funding for our farmers to be able to protect against the avian flu is really important in terms of biosecurity measures. There are other countries in the world that use vaccines for their egg-layers that have none of these issues. That’s a complicated solution because there are some trade implications that have to be considered. But listen, when Canada’s price of eggs is much lower than ours and they’re using that approach, that’s something we need to take a very strong look at.”
“Working to accelerate repopulation as the Biden administration and their USDA depopulated—which means wiped out—millions and millions of egg-layers,” she cited as another means of relief. “How do we quickly repopulate those farmers and their flocks? These are all really important points, and there are some other things we can do, but I think it’s important to note that it’s not going to happen overnight. This is years of arguably ineffective decision-making and not completely addressing the problem. There is a good chance we begin to cool this down over the coming weeks, more likely the coming months, and we’re already in talks with other food producers across the country, but I think it’s important everyone realize there is not a magic wand to be waved here. But there are some things we can do to begin tackling it not just for the next quarter of this year but for the next 10 years and 50 years to ensure this doesn’t happen again.”
Of course it’s Biden’s (or whoever was effectively in charge) fault for not acting on this for months. But funding biosecurity was evidently not a priority of the first Trump administration either so yeah … plenty of blame for all sleeping at the wheel.
For me, it’s the same old story. We saw this during the COVID pandemic as well. We cut corners for years in the name of productivity and efficiency and are in crisis mode because this type of governance leaves our country’s supply chains fragile (to black swan events). Another example of never thinking further than the next election (or news cycle for most politicians actors) until the shit hits the fan and people are blaming them for $8/dz eggs.
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Reference?
Unfortunately I don’t have any reference for what they failed to do to improve biosecurity. Seems like I’m asked a lot to prove negatives lately. Evidence from more recently…
But it’s possible that I missed some Trump administration push for vaccinations or to mimic Canada’s supply chain. And I don’t recall either Biden dismantling the advances of the Trump administration in that regard (or for that matter Biden doing anything about the situation which is just as bad).
Anyway, since it’s easier to prove a positive, if much was accomplished to increase food supply chain biosecurity from 2017-2020, would you mind pointing to which concrete measures were taken back then?
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So where it this $1B coming from? Taxpayers’ pockets? So yeah we’ll pay less for eggs at the supermarket but pay for them via taxes. But that sounds like something the Dems usually do, you know socializing losses.
Btw the article makes it sound like it was a mistake to cull diseased egglayers. Are we no longer going to cull flocks spreading diseases harmful to humans as part of the plan? I just hope the plan has some long term prevention. All I read was essentially emergency measures with no foresight to prevent the next crisis.
Yeah… No. If that’s part of the plan, forget it. For having experienced it as a kid when my family was raising some, I’d rather pay $8/dz to NOT have to deal with their mess and noise.
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Oh but they’re so cute! And they know when it’s time to go back to the coop! I found out a few neighbors have some and I never hear anything.
I would pay my neighbors to have a few chickens for me 
Until you have to clean their coop…