President Donald Trump got a rare bit of good economic news on Thursday, as the latest Bureau of Labor Statistics report indicated a cooling down of inflation to a year-on-year value of 2.7 percent — the lowest it has been since July. But some experts are raising red flags.
Multiple economists studying the data aren’t so sure that the president should be celebrating yet. For one, there are a lot of caveats in the data — as well as parts of the data that are simply missing for now.
For one thing, said Navy Federal Credit Union chief economist Heather Long, part of this cooldown reflects the federal government shutdown reducing economic activity across the board.
“This data point was impact by the shutdown. There is almost no October inflation data due to the shutdown and some impact on November data collection as well,” wrote Long on X. “Bottom line: Inflation probably didn’t improve this much. We need to see what happens in December and January. But inflation certainly doesn’t appear to be rising.”
“Inflation came in lowest than expected in November. But it’s hard to read too much into the data given how much the shutdown impacted data collection. Look at ‘Table A’ in the inflation report. So much is missing…” she wrote, posting the table. The only categories which had inflation data for October and November were gasoline, and vehicle sales. Several critical categories, including food, medical care, housing, and transportation had no monthly data collected at all.
Australian-American University of Michigan economics professor Justin Wolfers had a similar assessment — and he also noted that the particular period of November for which any data was collected might not be representative, for one simple reason.
“Inflation is both slowing (this was an unexpectedly good report), yet still above the Fed’s 2% target,” wrote Wolfers. “But this report may understate inflation a bit. Here’s why: Usually the BLS collects prices all through November. But the shutdown kept it closed for the first half of November. So more prices than usual were collected in the middle of ‘Black Friday’ sales.”
A lot of inflation data has been delayed in recent weeks by the Trump administration, which has been accused of worsening inflation with excessive tariffs and immigration raids that have disrupted key labor markets.
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