I don’t know what we’re supposed to make of Thursday’s inflation report from Donald Trump’s BLS.

October’s CPI release was of course canceled (I say “of course” not because that’s something the public should deem acceptable from their government, but rather because it’s been discussed ad nauseam by now). Due to the longest US government shutdown in history, the bureau wasn’t able to gather data for that month.

If you don’t have the numbers for October, you can’t calculate the month-over-month change for November, so Thursday’s release didn’t include MoM prints for headline and core CPI. Those are the readouts investors and policymakers care about when it comes to near-term decision making.

That said, basic math suggests the core measure rose just 0.1% in October and November (less, actually).

On a YoY basis, the core gauge rose just 2.6%, a huge downside surprise to the 3% consensus and the coolest since March of 2021.

Before we go down any conspiracy theory rabbit holes vis-à-vis the Trump administration’s determination to engineer excuses for more Fed rate cuts, it’s important to ask whether it’s reasonable to ascribe to this White House the sort of second-order thinking required for this particular gambit.

If you want to suggest this looks a little too convenient for a US president demanding lower rates and desperate to justify a Fed Chair nominee everyone knows will give Trump a de facto vote on monetary policy, consider that Trump would’ve needed to ask the BLS to goal seek the official November tally for the seasonally adjusted core CPI index such that imputing the sequential change for each month (i.e., backing out the October and November monthly changes using a compound interest calculator) would result in approximations for the MoM readings that tip a dramatic slowdown in underlying inflation. You also have to assume the BLS would go along with that.

I doubt that narrative. Rather, I think the data’s simply distorted. I think the BLS did its best to compute the change in the headline and core indexes over two months, and the results just were what they were. For the core index, that calculation was 0.159%.

As for the outlier drop in the YoY rate — a four-tenths downside surprise to consensus on the YoY core CPI read is anomalous — that too’s probably just a function of measurement error born of unreliable data. I don’t think it was possible to compute the index value (in this case the unadjusted core gauge) with anything like the usual precision and let’s face it, the calculations aren’t exactly precise under the best of circumstances.

Still, I’d be totally remiss not to remind readers that when it comes to single-issue polling, Trump’s deeply underwater on inflation, as illustrated below.

That, as consumer sentiment loiters near its worst levels on record in both marquee surveys of household moods, a state of affairs widely attributed to high prices.

There’s thus every incentive to get inflation down, and by any means necessary, up to and including simply marking it lower. No, that shouldn’t be possible in a democracy. (“Smokey this is not Venezuela, this is bowling. There are rules.”) But America’s not a democracy anymore. Not fully. So who knows what’s possible.

In the release, which was absolutely littered with disclaimers, explainers, reminders, footnotes and caveats, the BLS said it removed long-term care insurance from the health insurance index, citing “changes in the market for LTC that now make it out of scope and ineligible for pricing.”

I won’t even begin to guess at what that means (or doesn’t mean), but I can only assume removing that category will lead to lower overall inflation estimates — without casting any aspersions, it seems unlikely the BLS would make a change they know will result in higher measured inflation.

In any event, I’ll say the same thing about this release I said about the November jobs report — namely that the old “grain of salt” proviso’s insufficient. Channeling Jaws, “We’re gonna need a better idiom.”

Jerome Powell’s adamant that his Fed (note the emphasis) won’t put a lot of weight on data impacted by the shutdown. But he’s a lame duck. And you can be sure that Scott Bessent and the two Kevins (one of whom will be anointed “shadow Chair” next month) will suggest the inflation figures, distorted or not, point to scope for additional rate cuts sooner rather than later.