Companies Enhance Economic Data Products With Trust in US Statistics Wavering

 

(Bloomberg) -- Private-sector companies are beefing up their alternatives to US government statistics, seizing a moment of uncertainty around federal data.

One platform is providing its data free to the public, a major break from what’s otherwise largely been a for-profit enterprise. Others are investing in their statistics and publishing them more frequently, responding to client demands for real-time information at a time when government policy, and the economy at large, are rapidly changing.

That’s making economists and traders more receptive to private indicators, even though government data remains the gold standard due to its breadth and depth of measuring the world’s largest economy. What’s more, President Donald Trump’s abrupt firing of the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics — the traditionally apolitical agency responsible for producing key inflation and labor market data — and the perceived partisanship of his pick to replace her has some investors wary of its data.

“The more data, the better,” said Stephen Juneau, US economist at Bank of America Corp. “Private providers, including our own view of internal data, add to this basket of alternative indicators that we can look to to either confirm or corroborate the signals from the official statistics or complement them.”

Economists, the Federal Reserve and other policymakers have long incorporated data from private sources such as ADP Research, Challenger, Gray & Christmas Inc. and the University of Michigan to form their view on the health of the economy, and many Wall Street banks use their own card data to track consumer spending. Third-party providers garner even more attention during government shutdowns when federal data aren’t published — a relatively frequent threat in a country with such divisive politics.

 

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