‘Fake News’ via Officials too?

There’s a lot of talk about ‘fake news’ and it is always implied whatever comes from ‘officials’ is correct. But what if the officials want to paint a better picture than reality? Americans turned to Trump because things quite simply weren’t as rosy as Obama tried to make out. You can’t hide the impacts of reality. We have on occasion reported on shadowstats.com ‘s work as he keeps the data honest by showing how things would look now if the same methodologies were used for economic ‘measures’ like inflation and employment. The officials keep changing the way such data prints are calculated and you may be surprised to know those changes make things look better….  

On the back of the poorer than expected official US Q4 GDP print on Friday night (just 1.9%) it’s worth looking at some recent work by shadowstats.com about how GDP really looks when real inflation figures are used: