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81 sats \ 4 replies \ @SatsMate 20 Aug \ on: Fed confronts up to a million US jobs vanishing in revision econ
Is there a way to receive the economic data not through central planners such as unemployment, cpi, ppi, etc?
I honestly feel like word on the grapevine is a better indicator than any of these published official numbers. Whoever can solve this problem can problem make some coin as well.
For some things, there are private surveys conducted by industry groups or consulting firms. Generally, those data are very expensive and closely guarded, though.
It would be nice to have think tanks take on some of this. However, most of them are agenda driven, so it probably wouldn't be considered very trustworthy.
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I remember there was a lot of excitement over the term "Nowcasting", which was the idea of using scraped data from the web to generate real time measures of economic activity. For example, counting openings on job sites, reviews and restaurant openings on Yelp, Google searches for terms like housing, jobs, etc.
Not sure how successful any of these initiatives are/were. Part of the problem is that web scraping is a huge amount of work for what will amount to a public good.
(No doubt, private companies are scraping all the time to use the data privately)
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I remember an inflation measure called something like the Billion Price Index. The idea was to track online prices of literally every good. I'm not sure how solid their plan was, since you need volume data, too, and that's not available. Otherwise, how are you weighting all those prices?
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Yea I haven't seen anything on this @SimpleStacker or @Undisciplined but if you see anything on this I would love leverage a tool that tracks the true price. Shadow stats are good, but it doesn't cover things monthly, just over longer trends and periods of time.
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