Well, aside from this question being a straw man, I would say that my default assumption is not that everything the government tells me is a lie, like some people in these conversations. As it pertains to econometric data that government agencies like the BLS put out … do I think that this data is all fake and made-up? No. No I don’t.

The reality is, if the data was really as badly manipulated as you intimate, quants at hedge funds and other private researchers would have figured that out a long time ago, and probably made a big stink about it.