Bill Beach on the Challenges Facing Economic Data Collection
Update: 2025-10-17
Description
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.
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