The David Lin Report · Wednesday, July 1, 2026
EJ Antoni raised concerns about the accuracy of the Consumer Price Index (CPI), suggesting that changes like hedonic adjustments, intended to account for quality improvements, have likely overestimated savings and artificially lowered the reported inflation rate. He contrasted this with real-time aggregators like Truflation.
“This the same BLS though, that does the jobs report also does the consumer price index and the uh PPI that we mentioned earlier. So that that also has um let me put it this way that report is also very very problematic because a lot of changes have been made over the years to the consumer price index and the problem is that they all bias it in the same direction downward.”
“Now some of those changes I think there was good reason for making them but even if you look at things like the hyonic adjustment that tries to control for the quality of products and services improving over time I think it's very very clear that those things have been overestimated.”
“In other words, it has artificially reduced the consumer price index and and that compounds pretty significantly over time.”