Latest Breaking News

Economist and former Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy Paul Craig Roberts has cited John Williams' estimates in a review of unemployment rates in 2013. Williams' work has also been cited by author Wayne Allyn Root. Williams has been featured on Fox Business Network and his work has been cited by CNBC

In 2019, Roberts wrote in support of the views of Holocaust denier David Irving, asserting that "Irving, without any doubt the best historian of the European part of World War II, learned at his great expense that challenging myths does not go unpunished... I will avoid the story of how this came to be, but, yes, you guessed it, it was the Zionists".

Root was a leading proponent of the conspiracy theory that President Barack Obama was not born in the United States. Root falsely claimed that Obama was not a student at Columbia University. He later stated in a 2012 interview with Sean Hannity that he believed Obama was a "foreign exchange student" there. He has repeatedly described Obama as a "Marxist, anti-American, anti-Israel, globalist, middle class-hating, Muslim sympathizer". In 2017, he claimed that Obama was gay, called him "Bathhouse Barry" and said that he had info from Obama's "friends in Chicago" about his "sordid past". In 2014, he described Obama as a "Manchurian candidate", possibly hired by the Bilderberg Group to destroy the United States and "kill all of us"

University of Maryland Professor Katharine Abraham, who previously headed the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the agency responsible for publishing official unemployment and inflation data, says of Williams' claims about data manipulation that "[t]he culture of the Bureau of Labor Statistics is so strong that it's not going to happen." Steve Landefeld, former director of the Bureau of Economic Analysis, the Commerce Department agency that prepares quarterly GDP reports, said in response to an article about Williams, "the bureau rigorously follows guidelines designed to ensure its work remains totally transparent and absolutely unbiased." In the same article, UC San Diego economist Valerie Ramey, a member of the Federal Economic Statistics Advisory Committee, defended the methodological changes, claiming they were only made "after academic economists did decades of research and said they should be done."

Senior Fellow of the Niskanen Center Ed Dolan has found these alternatives to be "implausibly high" in spite of potential errors in the official data, especially when cross checked with data on nominal interest rates and physical output. Shadowstats measure of inflation has also been unfavorably compared with alternative private measures such as the Billions Prices Project which tracks millions of online retail prices from around the world in real time. In addition, despite claims of much higher inflation than official reports suggest, and even potential hyperinflation in the future, Shadowstats has not changed its $175 per year subscription fee since at least 2006, leading some to humor its own claims.

Responding to prior criticisms made by economist James Hamilton, John Williams explained in a private phone call that Shadowstats does not actually recalculate BLS data, rather, the Shadowstats CPI merely adds a constant to the officially reported numbers.

I’m not going back and recalculating the CPI. All I’m doing is going back to the government’s estimates of what the effect would be and using that as an add factor to the reported statistics.