[SAJ]

Exactly like that, Andy. You'll notice that I specifically said that said goobermint data can be ''spectacularly wrong''. BLS inflation figures are a crock in any case; ''core inflation'' is a laughably phony figure, and anyone with an IQ above room temp knows it. You probably don't follow the natural gas mkt, but there is **STILL** bitching going on about some superfunky data they released in August 2001. Gotta be careful with goobermint figs, but it does NOT pay to disbelieve them out of hand, right?

Also, have you ever noticed how frequently goobermint revises the stats it releases? Isn't that just another way of saying, ''Hey, folks, this is crapola in the first place!''?

[AndyJackson]

ever noticed how frequently goobermint revises the stats it releases

What they never do is just release the latest data, plotted on a graph, as a raw time series so that you can see the trend and yourself eyeball out all of the seasonal noise over the past few years.

have you ever noticed how frequently goobermint revises the stats it releases?

I love reading how this month something got better because of a downward revision of last month's figure. So, last month is even worse than originally reported, but that is now last month's news and the trend appears to be reversing, as if you can even discern a genuine trend on a month to month basis out of noisy data.