US economy shrank 0.5% in the first quarter, worse than earlier estimates

I'm a bit confused about the bit about the "Imports expanded 37.9%, fastest since 2020, and pushed GDP down by nearly 4.7 percentage points" bit.

Presumably when they calculated GDP previously, they hadn't seen quite as much imports, but had seen higher spending, thus they misattributed some of it to domestic products rather than imports, though I'm a bit confused as to how they underestimated imports given everything is declared. Perhaps some changes in the price index?

Though other articles talk about the expected GDP next quarter being higher because they don't expect a surge of imports to continue, which makes no sense to me unless one assumes spending remains the same with or without imports.

stolen from investopedia: The GDP formula is commonly expressed as GDP = C + I + G + (X - M), where C is consumer spending, I is business investment, G is government spending, and (X - M) represents net exports (exports minus imports). This formula helps measure the total economic output of a country during a specific period.

Our tariffs are tampering with the intelligent monitoring of GDP growth. When the USA expanded tariffs to 155% with China it was effectively an embargo, so imports went away (but exports didn't) and our GDP looked amazing. When the tariffs were brought back to previous rates of 55%, companies bought every import they could (or had them released from bonded warehouses) which has pumped the GDP in the other direction. And it'll likely be the same situation next month because Chinese ports are seeing record numbers as US companies try to buy every piece of inventory they can before these tariffs go back up.

One of the most upsetting things about our current state of governance is gamed metrics and lack of a national metrics "dashboard."

Metrics are gamed as marketing tools rather than assessment tools. There's a clear conflict of interest in the government presenting the metrics that it says to judge them by.

Unemployment is another gamed metric. If you want to get a sense of unemployment, a graph of % employed tells you more than some gamed number like "unemployment" since "unemployment" is a direct measure of political success.

Consumer spending/GDP are also directly used to measure political success, and a metric like "aggregate Visa/Mastercard purchases" is going to give a much better sense of how much people are spending.

During COVID, all cause mortality is a superior metric than COVID attributed deaths because any death attributed to COVID represented a failure of public health policy. We even saw direct attacks on public health monitoring in Florida.

It seems like the only ways to combat this are either states presenting their own metrics to imply national trends based on their own. I definitely wonder what kind of information we could get that is accurate and not gamed to create our own dashboards. Geohot's use of national energy consumption to estimate national productivity was sharp and the type of thing I wish journalists would do.

I don't think you know the space very well. Go to FRED, it is the largest of many that is a fantastic unbiased dashboard of governmental and societal data for the US. They even have almost the exact data that you would say is useful about CC spending. Here is all of the data that they publish about credit cards[1]. It has a lot more data than just the aggregate data from two of the credit card providers.

The people that gather and publish the data are historically pretty unbiased and open about methods. You can go get the raw data and methods. Some of the places that publish them like FRED, are not even under direct political jurisdiction. They are not at all the part of the government that is affected by the data they publish, and being run by a reserve bank puts them at pretty far reach from meddling by DC.

You can't stop politicians from using the data they like most, but don't pretend that ALL of the data isn't available in useful format.

1. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/tags/series?t=credit+cards

>being run by a reserve bank puts them at pretty far reach from meddling by DC.

Study the path other autocrats blazed for Trump, who is following and mimicing their tactics pretty closely now. Aggressive Fed interference is on his agenda, as can be seen by the way he likes to keep his fights with Powell constantly in the news cycle.