Today I'm coming to you with a topic I've thought a lot about recently,
which is economic data and how much we can trust that it's really painting a true picture of what's going on in the economy.
This is particularly on my mind right now because of a few things that have happened.
We've seen major revisions in some important economic indicators and President Trump recently fired the Bureau of Labor Statistics Commissioner who oversees a production of several important economic indicators.
So our concerns about the quality of economic data,
as well as its vulnerability to political influences, really warrant it.
I'm Allison Nathan and this is Goldman Sachs Exchanges.
Each month I speak with investors, policymakers,
and academics about the most pressing market moving issues for our top of my report from Goldman Sachs Research.
This month I first turned to Joseph Briggs,
who leads the global economics team in Goldman Sachs Research.
I asked him to dig into why data reliability has become a greater focus recently.
So there's a number of different reasons why economic data quality has shifted into focus.
The first and foremost is that we have seen fairly large revisions to the US payroll survey.
That's brought concerns around how reliable is the data that we're collecting top of mind.
There's also been a number of high profile issues with funding cuts,
particularly around the CPI survey.
And that's brought data quality issues top of mind.
And then President Trump's decision in August to fire the BLS commissioner has brought data quality issues definitely to the forefront.
There's also been a number of global data quality issues that have kept data quality issues top of mind.