The federal government’s monthly releases of economic statistics — especially the inflation rate and growth as tracked by gross domestic product — have long occasioned partisan preening (or denunciation) and for a general public stock-taking of the health of the economy.
Not this month. This time, they’re the occasion for doubt and confusion.
On Dec. 18, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that inflation had fallen to an annual rate of 2.7% in November, down from 3% in September and well below the 3.1% consensus of economists. And on Tuesday, the Bureau of Economic Analysis reported that real gross domestic product had shot up by a surprising 4.3% annual rate in the third quarter of 2025 ended Sept. 30.
The numbers give y…
The federal government’s monthly releases of economic statistics — especially the inflation rate and growth as tracked by gross domestic product — have long occasioned partisan preening (or denunciation) and for a general public stock-taking of the health of the economy.
Not this month. This time, they’re the occasion for doubt and confusion.
On Dec. 18, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that inflation had fallen to an annual rate of 2.7% in November, down from 3% in September and well below the 3.1% consensus of economists. And on Tuesday, the Bureau of Economic Analysis reported that real gross domestic product had shot up by a surprising 4.3% annual rate in the third quarter of 2025 ended Sept. 30.
The numbers give you meaningful information about the system, but not about how people experience their actual lives.
Zachary Karabell
Unsurprisingly, the Trump administration and its Republican acolytes seized on the figures to boast about Trump’s economic policies. White House economic advisor Kevin Hassett proclaimed the inflation figure to be "an absolute blockbuster report." He described the GDP figure as "a great Christmas present for the American people."
"America is winning again," crowed House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) after the GDP report. He called it "the direct result of congressional Republicans and President Trump delivering policies that drive growth and expand opportunity for American families and workers."
Um, not so fast.
The economists whose jobs involve scrutinizing those statistics to glean what they really mean don’t view them as unalloyed support for Trumponomics. Quite the contrary. Many see them as artifacts of the long government shutdown, which halted the collection of data that go into those reports, severely distorting the results. Furthermore, they expect the flaws in those reports to persist well into 2026, undermining their usefulness as true economic indicators.
“You’ve got to take it with a grain of salt," said Diane Swonk, chief economist at KPMG US, of the inflation report. "It’s confusing and it doesn’t quite square with prices that we’ve observed.”
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A close examination of the GDP figures also underscores the narrow basis driving economic growth in recent months — it’s essentially the product of robust spending by wealthy consumers and massive corporate investments in AI technology. For middle- and lower-income Americans, the economic present and future don’t look anywhere as sunny as the numbers would suggest.
"The numbers give you meaningful information about the system, but not about how people experience their actual lives," says financial analyst and economic commentator Zachary Karabell, whose 2014 book "The Leading Indicators" injected some perspective on how we interpret economic statistics and explained why our faith in them is often misplaced.
Indeed, consumer confidence has been sinking for months, according to the Conference Board. That points to an enduring question about the U.S. economy: Whose economy is it?
More than ever, it belongs to the rich, producing a "K-shaped" economy, which has been playing out in shopping patterns this holiday season, as my colleague Caroline Petrow-Cohen recently wrote.
According to Bank of America analysts, since this spring, spending by the highest-earning third of Americans has been soaring, while that of middle- and lower-income households has stagnated. In part that’s because the stock market has remained vibrant.
Since the top 20% of households as measured by income own about 87% of directly-held equities, stock market gains "tend to disproportionately benefit the higher-income cohort," the BofA analysts noted. By contrast, "almost 30% of lower-income households appear to be living ‘paycheck to paycheck.’”
The highest-earning 10% of households now account for nearly half of all consumer spending, according to Moody’s Analytics. That’s the highest level since the data began to be collected in the 1980s, when the rich accounted for only about one-third of spending.
Job growth may already have turned negative, even if the published employment figures don’t yet show it, Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell acknowledged during a Dec. 10 news conference following the Fed’s decision to lower interest rates by 0.25 percentage points.
Non-farm payroll gains have averaged about 40,000 a month since April, Powell observed. "We think there’s an overstatement in these numbers by about 60,000," he said. "So that would be negative 20,000 per month."
Read more: Hiltzik: Here’s why CEOs think Trump’s economic policies aren’t working
The divergence between the gross economic statistics and the lived experience of Americans is nothing new. It was remarked on by Robert F. Kennedy Sr. in a speech in March 1968, less than three months before his nascent presidential campaign was ended by an assassin’s bullet.
"Gross national product counts air pollution and cigarette advertising, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage," he observed. "It counts special locks for our doors and the jails for the people who break them. It counts the destruction of the redwood and the loss of our natural wonder in chaotic sprawl. It counts napalm and counts nuclear warheads and armored cars for the police to fight the riots in our cities. ... Yet the gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education or the joy of their play. ... It measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country, it measures everything in short, except that which makes life worthwhile."
That brings us to the specific flaws in the latest statistics.
The government shutdown, which lasted 43 days from Oct. 1 to Nov. 12, was the most important cause of gaps in the collected data for the consumer price index calculation. As Swonk noted in a social media post, cutbacks at the BLS had already reduced the staff assigned to sampling prices by 25%. That prompted the agency to substitute "imputed" numbers for hard data.
"Those cases can show up as zeros in the percent change of the release," Swonk wrote — obviously lowering the bottom-line figure. A sampling scheduled for mid-October had to be canceled, so figures dating from August were used instead — concealing any price increases in subsequent months.
A major problem concerns housing costs, which account for about one-third of the data inputs for the CPI. Because the BLS was unable to collect rental data for October, it implied that the monthly change in rents was 0% in October — further skewing the reported CPI lower. Experts say it will take at least six months to use newly collected data to provide a reliable estimate of housing inflation.
The delay in sampling, Swonk adds, means that some seasonal price phenomena were missed. She points specifically to airfares — the originally scheduled sampling would have incorporated a pre-Thanksgiving run-up in fares, but by the time the data were collected fares had returned to a non-holiday level.
Inflation data also are incorporated into GDP estimates — the lower the inflation rate, Swonk notes, the better the GDP looks. An artificially reduced inflation rate will translate into higher reported GDP growth.
All this might have a limited economic impact — corporations, banks and academic economists generally have sources other than the government to reach their conclusions — if not for the partisan political exploitation of the numbers.
As Karabell reported in his 2014 book, Simon Kuznets, the government statistician who helped to codify the collection of government figures in the 1930s, was concerned about how politics would give the statistics a misleading social significance.
"These numbers have turned into absolute markets of the human condition," Karabell wrote, "when they are simply statistical descriptions of specific systems."
Economists have warned that some economic factors haven’t yet fully played out. That includes Trump’s tariffs, which in their execution have been lower than they appeared on the surface, and higher healthcare premiums, which have been forecast or announced but won’t actually become effective until 2026.
If the job market continues to weaken, that will show up more vividly in 2026. The interplay between "a surging economy and a soft labor market," argues Joseph Brusuelas, chief economist at the business consulting firm RSM, "is likely to be the major economic narrative next year."
This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.