At The Money: How to Manage Your News & Data Flow

0:00I'm Hannah Fry, and as we rely more and more on artificial intelligence in every facet of our lives and businesses, I'm on a mission to find out how we can build the internet internet. AI needs. Learn more later in the podcast. The following episode of At The Money was recorded July 2025. This was before President Trump fired the Bureau of Labor Statistics Commissioner, Erica McIntarfer. Please note the conversation was recorded before that departure.

0:48Wall Street relies on data, economic releases, quarterly earnings, performance comparisons, but it's really easy to get tripped up by all of this math. How should investors manage this firehose of numbers? To help us navigate this, let's bring in Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Michael Hiltzik. He covers business for the Los Angeles Times. He's a two-time winner of the Gerald Loeb Award and has authored numerous books on business. So Michael, let's just start with the basics. How do you manage this endless torrent of data that comes our way? Well, that's a good question. Mostly, I try to ignore most of it and I curate what I use and what I rely on.

1:38And basically the way I work is I start with a topic that I want to explore, a subject I want to explore, and then I go search out the data that I need. And that way I'm not affected. I mean, there are some sources that come across my emails regularly that I will pay some attention to, but most of it I don't. And I know where to go most of the time for what I need. So let's talk about that. If you're going to be writing about or researching a particular subject, what sources of economic data do you rely on and what sources do you find troublesome and best ignored? Yeah, well, I think if I'm writing about something that touches on macroeconomics or domestic economics, I think you can't do better than the BLS, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, or the Bureau of Economic Analysis.

2:37And thus far, they haven't been undermined, maybe a little bit, but not too much by Trump. So their data are really still reliable. And I also go to FRED. That's the service from the St. Louis Fed that can reduce a lot of this, of the data from BLS and PEA to graphical form. And I've published FRED charts. You know, if there's a month that passes without it, that's rare. So I rely on those. How do you assess the credibility and accuracy of any source? Obviously, BLS, BEA, FRED have a very long track record, but what factors do you consider when you're looking at a source of economic data? Well, I look at these sources the way I look at any sources.

3:33I look for consistency. My father was a CPA, and he used to say, check the arithmetic. And I do that because over the years or decades that I've been writing about business and finance, I look for outliers in the data. And when I see something like that, it warrants further checking and it warrants skepticism, actually. So, you know, I look for trends to be consistent. I look for the data to be coherent and cohesive. And basically, if I can, I check one source against the other and then try to see if doing that turns up some flaw or flaws in the print. So you mentioned check the math. Are there any other common data quality issues that you encounter that investors should be aware of?

4:36Well, there are some consistent flaws or errors or mistakes that I find. And typically in news reports that use these data and then try to draw conclusions, I think, you know, I both probably feel that data that's produced without an inflation deflator or without an acknowledgement, particularly if it's a trend line, is something that I try to fix if I can. But certainly that's a context that is consistently lacking in reports of the data. When I'm reading a report of an economic release in almost any newspaper, I will always try to go back to the original print, not rely on somebody's interpretation.

5:34interpretation. I've just seen interpretations of data just be all over the place, particularly if we're talking about government programs that rely on financial statistics like Social Security, Medicare, Obamacare. I just see so many problems in reporting on those programs because Plus, reporters don't do the math or they don't do their homework or they come at these programs through a political perspective that basically allows them to ignore what's really happening. So you mentioned making sure the data is inflation adjusted. You and I have spoken about seasonality and how often that seems to trip up consumers of data.

6:26What other problems tend to arise when you see a commonly used data source or data series? Well, those are the big ones. If I'm looking at a chart, if it's a trendline chart and it doesn't go to zero so that you don't really know, you can't really tell if a change is significant or if it's an artifact of big numbers or small numbers. I want to be suspicious about that. And we see these flaws in reporting all over the place. The major newspapers, the wire services, cable news, they are basically winging it, and they're using data. They're using numbers that they get, and they're misinterpreting them sometimes wildly.

7:19So you mentioned FRED, which I really think of as an online software tool that depicts data series in a graph or an image. Any other software or tools that you find useful? Well, from time to time, we at the LA Times, we've used FactSet. We've used YCharts. I'm not sure, I'm pretty sure that we're not even subscribers to them anymore. But we use them for raw data and graphical displays. I find Yahoo Finance is as good as anything else. But when I'm using these sources, I do want to go back and double check the numbers just to make sure that what I'm using are the figures that were produced originally.

8:10What about trade organizations? I recall frequently, especially during the financial crisis, being annoyed by a lot of the spin from the National Association of Realtors, who are the original source of a lot of housing sales data. Yeah, I think you're absolutely right about that. I mean, if I need to turn to an industry source or a lobbying organization or what have you, like the NAM, the franchisees have something, and they all produce figures. If I'm looking for a figure that they produce, if I want to say, you know, the National Association of Manufacturers says this, then I'll use it. But with the caveat that that's who they are, you can't always trust them.

9:07They are almost always talking their book, so to speak. And we have to keep that in mind. And it's got to be reflected in what I write as well. And often, you know, some of these outfits are sources that I rely on to debunk. And it's always a good column if I can say, look, here's what these guys said and here's how they got the numbers wrong. And here's why they probably deliberately got the numbers wrong. What about think tanks? They publish analytical data frequently, but I would hardly consider them objective or disinterested parties. Yeah, I agree. Some are better than others. Some I will use or quote without too much fear.

9:53The Peterson Institute of International Economics, I find consistently pretty good. Definitely useful for trade issues, trade figures, trade commentary. There's another Peterson-funded think tank, the Commission for the Responsible Federal Budget. I mean, sometimes I find them useful. Sometimes their analysis is so infected by ideology or partisanship that I have to walk back what I see. I have to sort of recalculate what they've used. So you had a column recently on Tesla. What about public companies? How do we evaluate things like not just earnings, but forward guidance and all sorts of sometimes it's a little bit of happy talk about what's coming in the future?

10:50Yeah, well, I think, you know, if we're, you know, to the extent they're putting out disclosed financials, you know, subject to SEC oversight, that is what it is. You know, I can say this is what they've disclosed. This is what they've said. Forward guidance, I think. Forward guidance to me is basically trying to shoehorn a long-term perspective into a snapshot. It's very rare that it's useful at all. And of course, it also depends on who's doing the forward guidance. We had Elon Musk deliver a financial Q &A just last night. I'm not sure that any of that is useful any more than anything he says is useful.

11:46And it was very Muskian. We're going to have robots cleaning our house and take care of our children by the end of next year. I mean, his timelines are always suspect. And others, a company that's in trouble, you want to be very cautious about what they're saying. A company that's revising its forward guidance or dropping its forward guidance, I think we all know these are red flags. Yeah. I've been waiting for fully self-driving cars now for 10 years, and it's always two years away. So let me ask a slightly offbeat question. Um, early in my career, there was this entire group of conspiracy theorists who believed that the BLS was cooking the data that you couldn't trust BEA, that all of the government sources of information were partisan and biased and completely unreliable.

12:58That hasn't been my experience, but, but what's your experience like? Well, no, it hasn't been my experience. And look, the data, the statistics that come out of those agencies, basically, these are time trend prints, essentially. and they're the benchmarks. So I think we have to rely on them as benchmarks. And we know that BLS and BEA, I think, periodically revise their methodology, but they're transparent about it. And, you know, as long as we recognize that there's a break in the trend line, then I think we can deal with it safely. But, you know, politicians are always sort of attacking these sources when the numbers that they produce are inimical to their partisan goals.

13:59And we have to get used to it. We're certainly seeing that. Now, I think we'll see it more. We're going to see an attack on Fed data just intensifying. What are the other pitfalls that investors should be aware of when it comes to economic data? I think investors always have to be sensitive to the source of the data they're relying on. They have to be cautious about sort of second order or third order interpretations. The data, certainly on a macroeconomic or agency level, is always accessible. but uh you know i sympathize with investors who just don't have the time to to go back and look um i think projections of um market uh activity these are you know never uh of great value you know projections are always good and accurate right up to the point that they're not so um You know, and sort of larger issues.

15:05You know, when I hear somebody talking about, well, liquidity is going to drive the market or something like that, I don't really put much trust or reliance in that. So to wrap up, investors who are looking to learn more from economic data need to go to the original sources, prioritize, make sure you are aware of things like inflation adjusting and seasonal adjustments. be wary about trade organizations and think tanks. Not all of them are objective. The same is true about forward guidance from companies, public companies, about what they see in the future, and just generally use common sense when it comes to analyzing the endless firehose of economic data.

15:53I'm Barry Ritholtz. You're listening to At The Money on Bloomberg.

16:01As our use of AI expands, how do we make sure it doesn't end up breaking the internet? I'm Hannah Fry, host of The Exponential Era, a series that explores the real-world impact of future network technology. And I sat down with two experts to discover how we can support the massive connectivity needs of AI. Find out what I learned at bloomberg.com forward slash Nokia. You