Lying to your lenders is a bad enough idea when you’re an individual. It’s even worse when you’re a country.
By Luciana Lopez – cnn.com
Lying to your lenders is a bad enough idea when you’re an individual. It’s even worse when you’re a country.
That’s the specter critics of President Donald Trump have raised after he fired the head of the US Bureau of Labor Statistics this month after disappointing jobs data. While there’s no indication the data has been rigged (assertions from the White House aside) – or will be rigged in the future – the White House’s nomination of a partisan to lead the government’s economic data agency was enough to worry global economic and financial circles.
There’s historical precedent for that fear. Countries like Greece and Argentina have been both been punished by investors for putting out manufactured numbers in the past.
“President Trump has just taken one very negative stop along a slippery slope,” Alan Blinder, a former vice chair of the Federal Reserve, told CNN. “The next worry is going to be manipulation” of data.
At stake is the health of an economy relied upon by nearly every person on earth, directly or indirectly. The US economy affects everyone from Americans in glitzy Manhattan skyscrapers to, quite literally, garbage pickers living in developing nation slums.
But while Greece famously faked its way into the European Union and Argentina to this day remains embroiled in legal fights over its own sham numbers, there key differences here: The US economy is the world’s biggest, buoyed by its global dominance and its years of strength.
The Trump administration says firing Erika McEntarfer wasn’t about politics but was instead about making BLS data more rigorous and accurate.