Scandal Rocks Biden's Labor Dept For Lying About Sharing Non-Public Inflation Data With Secret Group Of Wall Street "Super Users"
A little over a month ago, a scandal erupted among the (relatively small( group of economists who keep a close eye on the monthly inflation data reported by the Biden Department of Labor, when they learned that there is an even smaller, and much more exclusive group of economists called "super users" who get preferential treatment from the BLS, including wink-wink-nudge-nudge explanations of where the data may diverge from expectations. That was the case for the January CPI when as Bloomberg first reported, the BLS sent an email to a group of data “super users”, which "explained suggested a surge in a measure of rental inflation — which left analysts puzzled — was caused by an adjustment to how subcomponents of the index are weighted":
==Once it became public knowledge that there was a super secret group of preferential "accounts" receiving economic data, immediately following the Bloomberg report, a recipient of the email said that BLS Statistics "tried to retract it and that they were told to disregard its contents." Almost as if they were trying to hide it after the fact.
In retrospect, it appears the BLS really did have something to hide, because in a follow up from both the NYT and Bloomberg, we now learn that an economist from the Bureau of Labor Statistics was corresponding on data related the monthly CPI print with major firms like JPMorgan and BlackRock, in what Bloomberg said "raised questions about equitable access to economic information."
Extending on the report from February, records requested by Bloomberg revealed that the unnamed BLS economist answered numerous inquiries about details within the CPI in recent months, mostly related to computations in key categories within shelter as well as used cars, according to
The back and forth between the financial firms and the economist "who has been with the BLS for many years" was first reported by the New York Times; as discussed previously, the government bureaucrat sent several emails to a broader group, which he called “my super users” in one of the emails obtained by Bloomberg. The BLS previously lied when it said it doesn’t maintain a list of “super users.”
In mid-February, one user asked if they could be added to the “super user email list,” to which the BLS economist replied minutes later, “Yes I can add you to the list.” The move was an attempt by the lowly paid government worker to curry favor with his much better paid peers on the sell- and buyside so that he could, one day, trade the preferential data access for a cushier job in some hedge fund or Wall Street firm.
As Bloomberg details, while the recipients’ names were redacted from the request, email signature details or disclosures from their employers were visible in some of the provided records. And in addition to BlackRock and JPMorgan, other banks, hedge funds and research firms — Brevan Howard, Millennium Capital Partners LLP, Citadel, Moore Capital Management, High Frequency Economics, Nomura Securities International and BNP Paribas — appeared in the exchanges and declined to comment. Pharo Management and Wolfe Research also came up in the emails but didn’t provide comment.
Understandably, economists - at least those who were not important enough to be on the "super user" list - have been clamoring to find out more about these “super users” are after the BLS staffer addressed an email to those people in February, suggesting that a change to the weights of underlying data within a key measure of rental inflation was behind its surge in January’s CPI. As we reported at the time, the BLS told recipients to disregard its contents, and subsequently tried to clear the confusion with a notice on its website. The agency also said that the email was “a mistake.”
https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/scandal-rocks-bidens-labor-dept-lying-about-sharing-non-public-inflation-data-secret-group