Is there a cost if economists face pressure to back up President Trump?

I'm David Brancaccio in Los Angeles. If you don't like the economic message, change the messenger.

The other day it was President Trump firing. The head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, after revisions, depicted a weaker job market than first thought.

Then this week, President Trump called on the CEO of Wall Street giant Goldman Sachs to get rid of his chief economist,

after the economist predicted not unreasonably that tariffs will force consumers to pay extra.

Working to discourage economic views that don't fit the administration's narrative can add risk for

stock market players. Susan Schmidt is portfolio manager at Exchange Capital Resources.

All of the major banks have economists out there espousing what they think might happen.

There's always an opinion that's different than the administrations, And it's highly unusual. I don't think that

I've ever seen this before in my career where the president has singled out one economist

to say this doesn't fit with my view. I don't agree. So if there's an effort to stifle views

that may be at odds with what the administration wants. I mean, does it have a wider effect?

There's plenty of other views out there. Fisling any views or perhaps changing the way data is

calculated makes it really hard for investors because it disrupts how they're used to processing

information. Importantly, it makes investors have lower confidence in the market

overall. That tends to make investors risk averse. And so it levels out markets, causing investors

to look at them with more skepticism and potentially lower us from these all-time highs that we're seeing right now.

Investors like certainty, comments like that imply that data is changing.

We criticize the Chinese market all the time because we believe that the Chinese government

pulls general data that doesn't agree with the overall government's opinion, and yet this has the

flavor of potentially starting down that same path here in the U.S.

Susan Schmidt, senior portfolio manager at Exchange Capital Resources. Thanks for this.

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