Ed Elson

Because as we discussed last week, the government shutdown did impact the CPI report from November.

And then the question now is, did it affect this one too?

Here to help us answer that very important question, we have Mark Zandi, Chief Economist at Moody's Analytics.

Mark, thank you for joining us again on Profit Markets.

So my first question to you, we discussed the previous CPI report, and you explained to us how the previous one from November was flawed.

we've got a similar report, a similar number, 2.7%.

I guess my first question to you, is this report flawed as well?

So I feel like this is a far larger story than what we're seeing in the news right now, where people are just kind of taking these numbers at face value.

And what you're telling us is you're running your own analysis that is making up for the adjustments that they missed in October.

which says that it's not 2.7%, it's 3%.

And considering this is one of the biggest issues in the nation right now, I think that this should be kind of more of a big deal, or at least people should talk about it more.

I guess, tell us more about how the report is flawed.

Like, we know that they were missing data in October.

How does that affect both November and December in the CPI report?

Yeah, everyone except for basically the person that matters, which is the president who was on Truth Social saying, we have a great low inflation report and taking these numbers at face value, which seems like a problem.

I guess we can just put that aside for now.

My question, you know, we had this flawed report for November.

We have the flawed report for December.

How long is this going to go on for, do you think?

How long are we going to be dealing with these CPI reports that we get from the BLS and which make these headlines, but then we have to add this asterisk and say it's not quite right?