The Greek financial crisis shows the need for reliable and independent economic data, the country’s economy and finance minister said Thursday, as the US grapples with a similar lack of confidence in government statistics.
Investors’ inability to trust official numbers — as a result of data falsifications and severe revisions — was a factor contributing to the Greek debt crisis in the early 2010s, which required multiple international bailouts and years of punishing economic reforms.
“Arguably, what you can’t measure, you can’t reform,” Kyriakos Pierrakakis said at Semafor’s World Economy Summit. “You need to have the same objective data on top of which you can argue, on top of which you can disagree, but you need the basis of objectivity when you’re having the discussion… This is why we need those authorities to be independent.”
US economic data is currently facing similar scrutiny; President Donald Trump fired of the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics in August, after the agency published jobs figures that missed expectations. The reliability of US economic data had been questioned before — particularly, common and significant revisions to jobs numbers — but Trump’s pressure has raised concerns that the public may not trust data that will begin to come out after the US government shutdown ends.
The shutdown is also preventing key data releases as federal workers remain furloughed — an issue that could leave the Federal Reserve in the dark when it comes to rates decisions.
Trump administration officials have doubled down on discrediting BLS statistics; a top US Treasury official said at Semafor’s summit Thursday that “there were always questions” about the BLS’ jobs data even before the White House’s scrutiny.
“People were questioning these data for a long time,” Joe Lavorgna, a former private sector economist who is now counselor to US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, told Semafor’s Business Editor Liz Hoffman.
A pattern of downward revisions of the monthly payroll numbers pointed to “such a consistent bias that there was already a lack of trust in the data” among investors and analysts, Lavorgna said.