Hi, Bill Crystal from the bulwark here, joined about my colleague, Catherine Rampel, to discuss

the economy and Trump's economy and Trump's political economy and all that.

Catherine joined the bulwark just, seems like, a little over a month ago, an invaluable

edition, and author of a very newsletter you need to subscribe to if you don't, called, what's it

called, the receipts, receipts.

Receipts, yep.

I had various witty names for that newsletter that were rejected. I'm just going to find out. Oh, tell me. I want to know. Well, maybe off the air is more info for you. Okay. The bucks stop here. Wouldn't that? It would have been good, right? Okay. Yeah. Maybe not. Maybe receipts is good.

Anyway, people can sign up for it and should sign up for it at the Blue Work website.

So your last newsletter actually is very interesting. Let's just begin with that for a minute. You discussed it with Andrew Wreger yesterday, I think, but on economic data in the age of Trump, say a word about that.

Sure. So there's been a lot of attention paid to the fact that we're in kind of a data blackout

right now because the government was shut down for six weeks. A bunch of releases that were

supposed to come out, didn't come out, a bunch of data that was supposed to be collected,

wasn't collected. So those releases will never come out. So like we'll never have the unemployment

report for October or the inflation report

for October. And I think the general assumption has been, well, at least this was like a one-time

thing. And now that the government has reopened, we'll be back on track. And that's not,

that's sort of right. It is the case that, like, the Bureau of Labor Statistics is back in business,

but there's a more widespread threat to the availability of government statistics on the economy

and otherwise. And that's because the Trump administration has been purging statisticians,

defunding statistical agencies, and otherwise censoring and manipulating

lots of data. So in some cases, they're like canceling data releases altogether. There's an

annual hunger report that assesses how many Americans are having difficulty struggling to get adequate food.

...