Remember when Donald Trump was bound by statute to publish inflation data? No? Me neither.
I’ve said this over and over in 2025, but it bears repeating. The liminal space between democracy and autocracy is defined by the gradual normalization of the abnormal, a process designed to stifle the public’s immune response through desensitization.
Put differently, the consistency with which norms are violated and laws broken makes the aberrational seem routine. As long as most citizens are generally free to go about their lives unbothered, they’ll passively acquiesce. It’s a boiling frog dynamic, and by the time the body politic wakes up to the reality, it’s too late.
What’s happening to America in 2025 under Trump is precisely what happened over time to Hungary with Viktor Orban and that’s not a coincidence: Project 2025 was conceived in part on Orban’s “illiberal democracy” blueprint.
On Friday, the BLS canceled the October CPI report saying it “could not collect reference period survey data due to a lapse in appropriations [and] is unable to retroactively collect these data.”
A BLS official later confirmed the bureau won’t publish a headline CPI print for October, nor a core CPI readout. Got that? If not, get it through your head: There isn’t going to be a CPI reading for last month. Trump canceled it. And there’s nothing you or I or anyone else can do about it. If there’s a relevant law, consider it null and void in the context of Trump.
Some partial, nonsurvey data for last month may be published on December 18 alongside the November CPI report which will itself be incomplete: It won’t be possible, the BLS said, to calculate the November MoM change for series where the October data’s missing.
Meanwhile, the BEA indicated it’ll reschedule the release of PCE price data covering October. There’s no word on a date for that.
The CPI cancelation came two days after Trump nixed the October jobs report, which’ll be published only as a partial release alongside a delayed update covering November on December 16.
This means the Fed will meet next month down two jobs reports and multiple inflation updates.
To be clear, most of this is logistics not a conspiracy. A lot of work goes into these releases and the nature of that work is such that if it isn’t done on time, it can’t really be done at all.
Still, the fact remains that we’re less than a year into Trump’s second term and he’s already i) fired the head of the BLS, ii) installed a sycophant on the Fed board, iii) attempted to fire another board member and iv) presided over a supposedly one-off cancelation of the two most widely-watched macro releases in the world, all at a critical juncture for the US economy.
Call it what you will, but don’t call it normal.
Trump is doubling down on his doubling down. What a guy, he even found time to threaten some democratic members of Congress with execution. I can’t help but wonder how John Roberts sleeps at night. After all he gave Trump the gold get out of jail card. Heck of a present for a man with zero self control.
Apparently there is a fallback for TIPS adjustment – if CPI is not published for a month then they estimate from last month’s CPI and the year-ago CPI, assuming that inflation continued at the average pace over the past year.
Anecdotal numbers paint a bleaker and bleaker picture of this economy, without a cancelled report. Telling us over and over how great everything is will start wearing thin as we approach midterm elections. There will be countless distractions, mostly overseas actions, that Trump and his minions hope will hold his majorities, but I think the jig is up. It can’t go on forever.
Economically sensitive stocks’ action is pre-recessionary, in some cases trading down into recessionary valuations. Defensive stocks are starting to act pre-recessionary as well, in their case that means acting better. It has been difficult to distinguish cyclicality from the capital-sucking of AI/tech. As the suck reverses and AI/tech disgorge capital, watch if econ sensitives underperform defensives.
I think that investors will rely less on top-level, headline macro data. Perhaps reflecting threats to its integrity and timeliness, but also the reality of a bifurcated economy. If the AI investment part is diverging so much from the non-AI part, you want lower level macro data that focuses on the non-AI part.