Trump has fired the director of the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
This basically means that - if he’s able to position his own toadie into the role - no one can have any faith in any of the economic numbers coming out of the Federal government.
I doubt that the financial world is going to react well to the idea that we all have to fly blind, and I expect Congress to start throwing feces at the President for this.
Many things he’s done are going to cost money, for individuals, for companies, for the economy and the country as a whole. And yet, no one (at least no one in the Republican Party) objects. Look at the constant flip-flopping tariffs, for example.
I’m sure Wall Street won’t like it, but I suspect Congress’s response will be something akin to an expression of concern from Susan Collins, followed by some meaningless sop tossed to them from the Trump maladministration, at which point they will go on confirming his judges and executive-branch appointees.
This isn’t going to get on the radar screen, but it is likely to be the sort of thing that will contribute to the coming disaster - the one that Republicans hope they will be able to pin on the Democrats.
This is what will most likely happen in my opinion.
Democrats will make useless noises. They have no real power so nothing will come of it.
Republicans in Congress will mewl pointlessly to try and shore up some kind of support in their home states. They are cowards so they will fall in lockstep when the time comes. It’s what they always do.
Susan Collins will furrow her brow even more. Someone should tell her that her face will stick like that if she keeps doing it.
Trump will do something else evil and stupid tomorrow so everyone’s attention will be drawn to that.
Trump will then put a MAGA replacement in the BOL and reality will bend a little bit more to his will.
Smart well meaning dopers will think that this is the thing that will begin to tip the scales back in the favor of normalcy again. Because we are living in a slow rolling nightmare of authoritarianism right now and reality is difficult to accept.
Is this being needlessly pessimistic? Probably. But November of 2026 and 2028 are a long way off and I don’t like our chances there either.
Please carry on.
ETA: This is too dry and formal of a thing to catch the attention of his supporters. There’s no emotion involved. It will have zero effect in the long term.
Let’s assume that the average person in Congress is a self-interested, corrupt liar with an eye towards using their position to perform insider trading.
I tell that person, “I’m going to lower your tax rate to 0% and shift the taxes onto the poor.” Do they really complain strenuously?
And, to the extent that the tariff moves do throw off the economy, rather than aid them, the President is doing all of this through deeply questionable legal reasoning. On the day that his strategy proves to be a failure, the Supreme Court just shuts him down and all the tariffs and nonsense go away. If, somehow, he keeps the tariffs from causing major panic and does achieve the off-loading of the tax burden to other folk, by keeping the percentiles low enough to have no big effect on the economy, then the Supreme Court lets him keep it and Congress can enshrine it into law.
But, the Fed and the BLS are a red line that I’m sure Trump has been told not to cross. If he wants to bullshit around with lying to the people about his tax burden plans, that’s on him. Good for him, if he succeeds. But every billionaire and millionaire in the land needs good and reliable economics data and a stable hand at the till of the Fed. You don’t fuck with that.
He crossed it today, by firing the head of the BLS. Are you posting from yesterday?
Krugman is on a tear today – three posts. First, his usual one, then one about the awful employment numbers, and then again on how we won’t be able to trust the BLS anymore.
ETA: Seriously, fucking with the data is a terrible, terrible plan and we’re totally screwed.
This is important. It means that, after there is a Trumpy replacement, we can no longer trust either unemployment or inflation numbers.
However, GDP figures needed to know if we are in a recession come from another office, the Bureau of Economic Analysis. The director there, Vipin Arora, was appointed in 2022.
Inflation is tracked by a few different groups. The Fed has their own inflation measure, which I believe is unrelated to the BLS. You can also go to Truflation for a 3rd party view of the numbers.
Do you mean its emphasis on Core PCE deflator vs. the standard (“headline”) CPI? That data comes from the Bureau of Economic Analysis, rather than Bureau of Labor Standards, but if that agency doesn’t give Trump the number he wants, he’s likely to interfere with it as well.
Or are you thinking of some other econometric measure of inflation that comes from the Fed itself? I can’t think of one.