The Real Economy vs. Propaganda

Truth is so passé. Seems it died back in 2007—at least in the US government.

You likely won’t know the name Graciela Bevacqua. No reason you should, really. Unless you’re an Argentine. And then maybe there’s a small chance you might remember that name from somewhere in your past.

Or not.

Her relevance to our story today will become apparent very soon…

Quick backstory: Graciela, who held an economics degree and calculated economic stats for an investment firm, joined Instituto Nacional de Estadística y Censos, Argentina’s national institute for statistics and the census data in 1984. She was part of the staff responsible for calculating monthly Consumer Price Index (CPI) data to measure inflation in Argentina… a blood sport in a country where hyperinflation and economic mismanagement is just another Tuesday.

By 2002, she’d been promoted to director of the CPI group.

We pick up Graciela’s story here, as quoted in a December 2012 article for the UK’s Royal Statistical Society (which I went digging for over the weekend)…

At first all seemed well; but then pressures to falsify the statistics begin to appear. In hindsight, it is now apparent that problems began as early as 2005, when a newly appointed Minister of Economics began questioning the CPI figures… These initial questionings were merely a preview of the enormous pressure that would be placed on (the agency) from 2006 with the appointment of Guillermo Moreno as Secretary of Domestic Trade.

As soon as Moreno was appointed, he summoned me and my immediate supervisor to his office. When we entered the room, I became scared. He began a tirade about how the consumer price index affected people’s morale and the effectiveness with which the government can successfully implement policies that increase confidence in the economic outlook. He was demanding that the official statistics… should be more favorable to the government.

He said that if we didn’t aim for zero inflation, we were unpatriotic. He told us that the patriotic thing to do was to report a low CPI… Then he proceeded to demand the list of businesses from which (the agency) obtained the pricing information from which we calculate the CPI. This was something that clearly violated the law that establishes confidentiality to providers of data to (the agency) and other statistical agencies.

The demands from Moreno were daily. He challenged our data, our methodology and our results. Phone calls from Moreno were 40-minute-long shouting demands, asking for information to which, by law, neither he nor his office had any right… As an example, Moreno wanted (the agency) to apply a rounding approach whereby 2.599 and 2.501 would both be rounded down to 2.5. That may sound minor, but as the respected magazine The Economist pointed out, a 1% monthly inflation rate works out at an annual 12.7%, whereas 1.9% monthly compounds to 25.3%. The government wanted the public to believe the lower figures; the truth was the higher ones.

I’ll stop there because you see where this is going, no doubt.

Graciela was fired in 2007 because she refused to play ball, believing Argentines had a right to the truth, to understand what was really happening in their economy, which clearly had impacts on their daily financial lives.

Not surprisingly, Argentina began reporting much lower inflation rates.

But the fraudulent numbers only served to mask reported reality. They couldn’t mask the truth that consumers and businesses felt in their own finances.

By 2010, even the half-baked numbers were showing inflation taking off again, ultimately leading to hyperinflation in the land of Malbec and Tango. Across the remainder of the 2010s, inflation ramped to nearly 50%… and soared to more than 200% by 2024.

With that, we return to America… where an insecure president last Friday fired the Bureau of Labor Statistics Commissioner just a few hours after the agency released the latest jobs report, which showed that the country added far fewer jobs than expected. The agency had also revised sharply downward jobs data from previous months. Over the last three months—a period marked by Trump’s knuckleheaded tariff agenda—US job growth amounted to a laughable 35,000 jobs, the worst showing since the COVID pandemic.

That picture is clearly unflattering to an economy that Trump insists is the best in the world. So, Trump did what so many authoritarian leaders do: Shoot the messenger when the message shows that their economic policies are failing.

Then, over the weekend, one of the White House’s apparatchiks, National Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett, said Trump was justified in the firing because the bad numbers were proof that the data were rigged by a Biden appointee. (Never mind that Bureau of Labor Statistics data has been revised pretty much every month, and annually, since the agency started tracking jobs data in October 1915, because the numbers from businesses don’t always arrive in time.)

Hassett’s assertion is akin to bingeing on an all-you-can-eat Pizza Hut buffet every day for a year… then throwing away your scale for showing that you’re obese.

The real story came out when Hassett told NBC News that Trump “wants his own people” inside the agency.

Ahh… There it is. The rub.

Spoken like a true autocrat-in-training.

When the data won’t play your game, you play the data by putting in place the toadies who provide the data you want, regardless of how much said toadies have to massage the numbers and lie to make them look good.

It’s Graciela Bevacqua singing Don’t Cry for Me Argentina, but to the tune of Yankee Doodle Dandy.

This will not end well.

Trump has now sent the message that if economic data paints his policies in a bad (albeit 100% accurate) light, then the data is rigged, the collection method is flawed, and whoever runs the agency is clearly a Democrat hack out to make him and the Trump administration look like bumbling amateurs.

How can investors now trust BLS data?

How can they trust that other government economic data isn’t massaged or fabricated simply because an agency head wants to protect their job or make Dear Leader happy?

Those are extremely troubling questions because billions and trillions of dollars of investment decisions are based on the understanding that, of all nations, the US is supplying the world with honest numbers.

If that perception is no longer true, then Trump’s America is no longer a safe place to put cash to work.

When the next BLS release arrives, don’t be surprised if it speaks to a marvelous jobs market. We will probably see revisions to the recent downward revisions, with a new agency head insisting that the previous methodology was all fakakta and that these new and wondrous numbers are 1,000% accurate and “My lordy—look how stunning the Trump economy really is when it’s not being kneecapped by a (insert spit here) Biden stooge.”

Truth, however, will be hiding in plain sight: Prices on the rise at Walmart and Target and Best Buy… more and more of your neighbors suddenly jobless… your income shrinking relative to what your paycheck can afford.

But hey, at least the unemployment rate is negative 42.6%… pharmaceutical prices are down 1,500% and now Walgreens and CVS are actually paying you to take prescription drugs off their hands… and the economy is growing at 7,000% and is the best economy that has ever existed, or ever will exist.

Reported inflation will be zero.

But in the real economy that lives just on the other side of propaganda, your wallet will know that hyperinflation is running buck wild.

Just don’t cry for me Argentina… or Zimbabwe… or Venezuela.