GoldSeek Radio's Chris Waltzek talks to John Williams of Shadowstats
Mr.
Williams was born in 1949. He received an A.B. in Economics, cum laude,
from Dartmouth College in 1971, and was awarded a M.B.A. from
Dartmouth's Amos Tuck School of Business Administration in 1972, where
he was named an Edward Tuck Scholar. During his career as a consulting
economist, John has worked with individuals as well as Fortune 500
companies.
Although I am known formally as Walter J. Williams, my
friends call me “John.” For 30 years, I have been a private consulting
economist and, out of necessity, had to become a specialist in
government economic reporting.
One of my early clients was a
large manufacturer of commercial airplanes, who had developed an
econometric model for predicting revenue passenger miles. The level of
revenue passenger miles was their primary sales forecasting tool, and
the model was heavily dependent on the GNP (now GDP) as reported by the
Department of Commerce. Suddenly, their model stopped working, and they
asked me if I could fix it. I realized the GNP numbers were faulty,
corrected them for my client (official reporting was similarly revised a
couple of years later) and the model worked again, at least for a
while, until GNP methodological changes eventually made the underlying
data worthless.
That began a lengthy process of exploring the
history and nature of economic reporting and in interviewing key people
involved in the process from the early days of government reporting
through the present. For a number of years I conducted surveys among
business economists as to the quality of government statistics (the vast
majority thought it was pretty bad), and my results led to front page
stories in 1989 in the New York Times and Investors Daily (now Investors
Business Daily), considerable coverage in the broadcast media and a
joint meeting with representatives of all the government's statistical
agencies.
Nonetheless, the quality of government reporting has
deteriorated sharply in the last couple of decades. Reporting problems
have included methodological changes to economic reporting that have
pushed headline economic and inflation results out of the realm of
real-world or common experience.
Over the decades, well in excess of
1,000 presentations have been given on the economic outlook, or on
approaches to analyzing economic data, to clients—large and
small—including talks with members of the business, banking, government,
press, academic, brokerage and investment communities. I also have
provided testimony before Congress (details here).
An old friend—the
late-Doug Gillespie—asked me some years back to write a series of
articles on the quality of government statistics. The response to those
writings (the Primer Series available at the top-center of this page)
was so strong that we started ShadowStats.com (Shadow Government
Statistics) in 2004. The newsletter is published as part of my economic
consulting services. — John Williams
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