Joel Skousen’s World Affairs Brief, January 19, 2024
John Williams on the Current State of Inflation: John Williams has been at the head of “Shadowstats.com” for years—the best source for real inflation numbers. In this interview with Jason Burach, founder of Financial Education Company, Williams tells the history of how Congress decided in 1983 to begin skewing the Consumer Price Index with new criteria in order to reduce what Social Security recipients would get from the annual COLA—Cost of Living Allowance adjustment. He says the changes they have made over the years lower the real rate of inflation by 8 full percentage points. So if the CPI is 2%, it’s really 9-10%. I think he’s right.
Jason Burack of Wall St for Main St interviewed returning guest, economist John Williams from Shadow Government Statistics https://www.shadowstats.com or Shadow Stats.
John calculates CPI using the old government formulas from the 1980s and the 1990s before PhD Economists and the BLS started making a lot of adjustments to input data, cherry picking and also adjusting the formulas for CPI, money supply, GDP and Jobs Reports to fit political narratives.
During this 40+ minute interview, John talks about why the real inflation rate is not currently 3% according to the CPI and headed below 2% like many people on Wall St, business TV and government officials are claiming.
John talks about how and why input data and formula changes for CPI, Jobs Reports, GDP and money supply are being done. Since 2020, the Fed changed the money supply definition again and then proceeded to increase money supply by around 120% during the pandemic in only 2 years!
The best case scenario going forward according to John Williams is bad stagflation similar to the 1970s.
Bloomberg News article referred to during the interview about cost of living and inflation being way above CPI: https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/20…
John Williams (Shadow Stats): Inflation Is Not Headed Below 2% As Big Gvmnt Spends Trillions More
Jan 4, 2024