更新時間 14 min read
A version of this post first appeared on TKer.co
Policymakers, politicians, business leaders, and investors all use economic data. So, most people agree that any data being cited should be high quality.
But everyone relies on data differently depending on their goals and interests, which means the implications of data quality varies depending on who’s using it.
Today, I’m going to provide some updates on deteriorating data quality and share some thoughts from the stock market investor’s perspective.
We got some unsettling news about data quality last week.
From the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) on Tuesday:
Due to minor errors to weights associated with the introduction of a redesigned Current Population Survey (CPS) sample, some April 2025 estimates will be corrected on June 6, 2025. Major labor force measures, such as the unemployment rate, labor force participation rate, and employment–population ratio were unaffected. While corrections will be made to many estimates, the impact is negligible.
In April 2025, the CPS began to phase in a redesigned sample that is based on information from the 2020 Census. During the introduction of this new sample in April, a derived geographic variable used in the weighting process was miscoded, treating micropolitan areas like metropolitan areas, which led to misapplied noninterview weights for some cases.
That doesn’t instill confidence.
It didn’t end there.
Here’s the The Wall Street Journal on a BLS notice published on Wednesday:
The Bureau of Labor Statistics, the office that publishes the inflation rate, told outside economists this week that a hiring freeze at the agency was forcing the survey to cut back on the number of businesses where it checks prices. In last month’s inflation report, which examined prices in April, government statisticians had to use a less precise method for guessing price changes more extensively than they did in the past.
Economists say the staffing shortage raises questions about the quality of recent and coming inflation reports. There is no sign of an intentional effort to publish false or misleading statistics. But any problems with the data could have major implications for the economy.
"These errors have consequences," UBS’s Paul Donovan wrote on Friday. "Less understanding of U.S. inflation increases the chances of the Federal Reserve making a policy error (especially with the mantra of ‘data dependency’)."
The news only adds to ongoing concerns about the quality of government data, which relies on extensive surveys and analysis of those surveys.
