One Year
$175.00
Six Months
$89.00
ShadowStats Newsletter
"John Williams’ Shadow Government Statistics" is an electronic newsletter service that exposes and analyzes flaws in current U.S. government economic data and reporting, as well as in certain private-sector numbers, and provides an assessment of underlying economic and financial conditions, net of financial-market and political hype.
|
Latest Commentaries
Subscription
PUBLISHING SCHEDULE: The next Regular Commentary, scheduled for Tuesday, May 5th, will cover March construction spending, the trade deficit and annual revisions to retail sales, followed by a Commentary on May 8th, covering the April employment and unemployment numbers. See Schedule (LAST UPDATED April 29th)
|
No. 715: First-Quarter GDP, Velocity of Money

April 29th, 2015
• Initial 0.2% First-Quarter2015 Real GDP Growth Is on Track for a Quarterly Contraction in First Revision
• Games-Playing: Was Initial Real GDP Estimate Set at 0.2%, So Nominal GDP Would Not Fall Below 0.1%?
• Real Final Sales (GDP Less Purported Inventory Build-Up) Fell at Annualized Quarterly Pace of 0.5%
• Velocity of Money Slowed in First-Quarter 2015 More ...
No. 714: March Durable Goods Orders, Median Household Income, New- and Existing-HomeSales

April 24th, 2015
• Both Nominal and Real First-Quarter 2015 GDP Face Contraction, But Headline Downturn May Await the First Revision
• Consensus Forecasts Never Catch Economic Downturns, Yet the Consensus Outlook Is Weighted into the Initial GDP Estimate
• Real Durable Goods Orders Confirmed Back-to-Back Quarterly Contractions; Signaling a Second-Quarter GDP Decline and Formal Recession
• Household Income Declined Sharply in March
• Existing-Home Sales Fell at Annualized 7.2% (-7.2%) Pace in First-Quarter 2015
• Unstable Plunge in New-Home Sales Data Amidst Continued and Protracted Stagnation More ...
No. 713: March CPI, Real Retail Sales and Earnings, Housing Starts, GDP Prospects

April 17th, 2015
• Housing Starts Plunged at Annualized Pace of 31.0% (-31.0%) in First-Quarter 2015
• Real Retail Sales Contracted at 2.0% (-2.0%) Annualized Pace in First-Quarter, Worst Showing Since Depths of Economic Collapse
• Annual Real Sales Growth at Recession Level
• Real Earnings Fell by 0.4% (-0.4%) in March
• March Year-to-Year Inflation: -0.1% (CPI-U), -0.6% (CPI-W), 7.5% (ShadowStats)
• First-Quarter 2015 Real GDP Headed for a Contraction More ...
No. 712: March Nominal Retail Sales, Industrial Production, PPI

April 15th, 2015
• Quarterly Retail Sales and Industrial Production Last Dropped Together in First-Quarter 2009, When Real GDP Contracted 5.5% (-5.5%)
• Nominal Retail Sales Fell an Annualized 5.0% (-5.0%) in First-Quarter 2015; March Annual Growth Was Weakest Since Economic Collapse
• Real Retail Sales Also Locked-In to First-Quarter Contraction
• Pummeled by Declining Manufacturing and Oil and Gas Production,Industrial Production Fell an Annualized 1.0% (-1.0%) in First-Quarter 2015
• First-Quarter 2015 GDP Still on Track for Renewed Downturn
• March PPI Inflation Was Almost Unremarkable More ...
No. 710: March Employment and Unemployment, Money Supply M3

April 4th, 2015
• First-Quarter GDP Contraction Is an Increasingly Solid Bet; Market Sentiment Should Begin Shifting Towards "New" Recession
• March Labor Data Fell Apart on Both the Payroll and Unemployment Fronts
• Net of February Revisions, March Payrolls Gained Just 57,000
• Masked by Rounding, Headline Unemployment Actually Declined by 0.1% (-0.1%), Due to Discouraged Workers Being Defined Out of Headline Existence, Not Due to the Unemployed Finding New Jobs
• March 2015 Unemployment: 5.5% (U.3), 10.9% (U.6), 23.1% (ShadowStats)
• Annual Growth in March 2015 Money Supply M3 Eased to 5.6%, from February's Revised 5-Year High of 5.8% More ...
No. 707: February New Orders for Durable Goods

March 25th, 2015
• Durable Goods Orders in Back-to-Back Quarterly Contractions, Both Before and After Consideration of Commercial Aircraft Orders and Inflation
• Signal Is for an Intensified Decline in Production and GDP, in Both First- and Second-Quarter 2015, a Looming Recession More ...
No. 706: February CPI, Home Sales and the Economy, Fed and Dollar

March 24th, 2015
• Headline February Real Retail Sales Fell by 0.8% (-0.8%), Annual Retail Sales Growth at Recession Level
• First-Quarter Real Sales Contracting at 2.6% (-2.6%) Annualized Pace, Worst Showing Since Depths of Economic Collapse
• Real Earnings Were Down for the Month
• February Year-to-Year Inflation: 0.0% (CPI-U), -0.6% (CPI-W), 7.6% (ShadowStats)
• Unstable Home Sales Data - New Sales in Protracted Stagnation, Existing Sales Trending Lower
• Dollar and Fed Policy Begin to Falter More ...
Archives
|
|
Have you ever wondered why the CPI, GDP and employment numbers run counter to your personal and business experiences? The problem lies in biased and often-manipulated government reporting.
Primers on Government Economic Reports What you've suspected but were afraid to ask. The story behind unemployment, the Federal Deficit, CPI, GDP.
|
Specialized Economic Consulting
Services include customized forecasts and analyses of the general economy, presentations and consultations in-house for clients. Contact us to discuss your needs.
John Williams' "Shadow Government Statistics"johnwilliams@shadowstats.comTel: (415) 512-7701
American Business Analytics & Research LLC
The Hearst Building 5 Third Street, Suite 1301 San Francisco, CA 94103
|
|
Some Biographical & Additional Background Information
|
Walter J. "John" Williams was born in 1949. He received an A.B. in Economics, cum laude, from Dartmouth College in 1971, and was awarded a M.B.A. from Dartmouth's Amos Tuck School of Business Administration in 1972, where he was named an Edward Tuck Scholar. During his career as a consulting economist, John has worked with individuals as well as Fortune 500 companies.
Although I am known formally as Walter J. Williams, my friends call me “John.” For 30 years, I have been a private consulting economist and, out of necessity, had to become a specialist in government economic reporting.
One of my early clients was a large manufacturer of commercial airplanes, who had developed an econometric model for predicting revenue passenger miles. The level of revenue passenger miles was their primary sales forecasting tool, and the model was heavily dependent on the GNP (now GDP) as reported by the Department of Commerce. Suddenly, their model stopped working, and they asked me if I could fix it. I realized the GNP numbers were faulty, corrected them for my client (official reporting was similarly revised a couple of years later) and the model worked again, at least for a while, until GNP methodological changes eventually made the underlying data worthless.
That began a lengthy process of exploring the history and nature of economic reporting and in interviewing key people involved in the process from the early days of government reporting through the present. For a number of years I conducted surveys among business economists as to the quality of government statistics (the vast majority thought it was pretty bad), and my results led to front page stories in 1989 in the New York Times and Investors Daily (now Investors Business Daily), considerable coverage in the broadcast media and a joint meeting with representatives of all the government's statistical agencies.
Nonetheless, the quality of government reporting has deteriorated sharply in the last couple of decades. Reporting problems have included methodological changes to economic reporting that have pushed headline economic and inflation results out of the realm of real-world or common experience.
Over the decades, well in excess of 1,000 presentations have been given on the economic outlook, or on approaches to analyzing economic data, to clients—large and small—including talks with members of the business, banking, government, press, academic, brokerage and investment communities. I also have provided testimony before Congress (details here).
An old friend—the late-Doug Gillespie—asked me some years back to write a series of articles on the quality of government statistics. The response to those writings (the Primer Series available at the top-center of this page) was so strong that we started ShadowStats.com (Shadow Government Statistics) in 2004. The newsletter is published as part of my economic consulting services. — John Williams
|
|