Like everything else about Clown World, mainstream economics, as reported by the financial media, is not only false, but known to be false by the serious professionals. Which is why what passes for the “real numbers” are recorded in a separate set of books by the Bureau of Labor Statistics for release to their fellow clowns.
A little over a month ago, a scandal erupted among the (relatively small( group of economists who keep a close eye on the monthly inflation data reported by the Biden Department of Labor, when they learned that there is an even smaller, and much more exclusive group of economists called “super users” who get preferential treatment from the BLS, including wink-wink-nudge-nudge explanations of where the data may diverge from expectations. That was the case for the January CPI when as Bloomberg first reported, the BLS sent an email to a group of data “super users”, which “explained suggested a surge in a measure of rental inflation — which left analysts puzzled — was caused by an adjustment to how subcomponents of the index are weighted”.
Once it became public knowledge that there was a super secret group of preferential “accounts” receiving economic data, immediately following the Bloomberg report, a recipient of the email said that BLS Statistics “tried to retract it and that they were told to disregard its contents.”
The irony is that even those “real numbers” are also based on an incorrect, outdated, and misleading economics model, but they are sufficiently better than the publicly-released numbers to give the favored group of insiders an advantage vis-a-vis everyone else who is active in the financial markets.