Michael, What did the WSJ report?
I checked the BLS website. In the past month or so the BLS made two changes to their techiques (change expenditure weights, change in seasonal adjustment weights). Neither of these is a major change; it is standard operating proceedure to make these changes, I think. The last major change was in 1998 when they expanded the use of the geometric mean, which is supposed to adjust for the substitution effect. It did lead to reduction in the reported inflation rate of about 0.2 percentage points. It is not entirely clear if this change was due to the political pressure from Congress. The BLS was, I think, planning to make this change before the Boskin Commission bad research was done. I'm not aware of any major changes planned for this year, although the new BLS commissioner is unlikely to be as affective as Abraham in fighting Congress. Eric
