By now, it was meant to be clear that tariffs were pushing up US inflation and depressing employment but, until the producer prices index for July was released this week, evidence had been mixed. 

There has been little sign of passthrough to consumer prices although payrolls growth in July and big downward revisions to the May and June estimates were bad enough to provoke President Donald Trump to fire the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics and replace her with a yes-man.

To discuss the policy implications of the PPI and politicised data, Medley Advisors brought together four of its analysts - two (Dan Schwartz and Michael Redmond) who rely on high-quality statistics to do their jobs and two (Brian Jackson and Ignacio Labaqui) with hands-on experience of inconvenient truths in China and Argentina.

"Once you start with this gross manipulation statistics, it's likely you will see this spreading to others," says Labaqui. In Argentina, “it started with CPI, but then moved to poverty and then to GDP and finally to foreign-trade statistics ... It was not only that the private sector started to just not pay attention to the official statistics but also the central bank … started using private-sector statistics. One second consequence is that you see a mushrooming of private consultants running their own statistics".

In order, the speakers are Schwartz, Redmond , Jackson and Labaqui.