Odd Lots · Monday, July 6, 2026
Brian Golden, an inflation forecaster who reportedly outperforms Bloomberg consensus, detailed his bottom-up approach to predicting inflation, which involves reconstructing the Bureau of Labor Statistics' (BLS) formula in Excel and analyzing price trends. Golden expressed surprise that institutional forecasters with significantly more resources are not more accurate, suggesting a lack of effort or a flawed methodology.
“But the real thing for me is I just think that this. Says a lot more of about the sort of softness of the people, the investment banks and people who predict this in the institutional end than it does about me, because when you predict inflation, it's not even a prediction, it's in the past. It's data that has already happened.”
“It has been very surprising to me since I entered this space that the places who advise billions of dollars of capital with their inflation forecasts aren't better at this.”
“It's you know, not just shocking from a kind of what are they doing and why aren't they trying harder? But I think we find in both economics and elections that expert forecasts really shape expectations and that can play a big role in narrative creation and how the public response to that.”