It's not 'my CNBC', though I watch and read it. Bu

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A number of economists and finance experts have claimed that the Shadowstats CPI is conceptually wrong and that their usage leads to easily disproven and absurd conclusions.[4][12][13][14][15]

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 " 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."[2]

Others find 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.[16][17] 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.[18][19][20]

In addition, despite claims of much higher inflation than official reports suggest, and even potential hyperinflation in the future[21][22], Shadowstats has not changed its 175$ per year subscription fee since at least 2006, leading some to question its validity.[23][24]

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.[25]

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 ad factor to the reported statistics.

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