Bill Beach on the Challenges Facing Economic Data Collection

Recent revisions have cast doubt on the reliability of the government’s economic statistics. Budget cuts and job vacancies at the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) have exacerbated pre-existing issues from low initial survey response rates and the difficulty of identifying economic inflection points in real-time. Striking the right balance between timeliness and precision is essential for investors and the Fed to make well-informed decisions. In this episode, we talk with Bill Beach, Commissioner of the BLS from 2019-2023, about the process behind BLS data collection, why recent revisions have been so large, and different ways to improve government data.