“Suddenly a lot of Wall Street clients were like, oh no, what if suddenly BLS goes dark, or what if we cannot trust BLS numbers anymore? We need a private alternative that has a wide distribution platform. That's the pitch, really.”
Marketplace (APM) · Money & Markets · November 2026
Context
Asked what the pitch was for building Bloomberg's private inflation tracker, Anna Wong says it came from clients after the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics was fired last summer. It shows how worries about government data are creating private-sector substitutes.
Transcript
Happy to be here, Kai.
So you go to the higher-ups at Bloomberg Economics and you say, I've got this project I want to do. What was the pitch?
Well, actually, the pitch was from people outside of the company. So it actually started when the BLS commissioner was fired last summer, if you recall, because of a really weak jobs number. Then suddenly a lot of Wall Street clients were like, oh no, what if suddenly BLS goes dark or what if we cannot trust BLS numbers anymore? We need a private alternative that has a wide distribution platform. That's the pitch, really. We were told to do this. Fair enough.
Well, you got to do what the clients want, right? You got to do what the public wants. Tell me now about, in layman's terms, please, what this thing is. What's the special sauce that you have?
Yeah, so you know, the BLS, every month they collect roughly 100,000 price quotes. You know, field agents would go into, say, best buy and then like start looking at the shelf and collecting data. For us, because Bloomberg has so much alternative private sector data, we decided to take an approach…
And how'd you do? I mean, we just got CPI the other day.
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