Sec. Bessent Praises Trump’s Pick to Lead the BLS: E.J. Antoni Is a ‘High Integrity, Data-Driven, Ruthless Truth Pursuer’

EXCERPT:

BESSENT: “Well, Larry, good to be with you. And it’s a real problem. As you said, if the Fed says they’re data-dependent and the data has been atrocious, then it seems like there are probably some make-up cuts in order here, or the size of this month’s cut needs to be recalibrated. And sure, it can be fixed. Anything can be fixed. You just have to, first, we had to establish it was broken, which President Trump did. Now we have to go about fixing it and it wasn’t working well before, kind of this lazy notion that they had dropped down to these low response rates, 30, 40 percent response rates, and they intuited the balance. Intuiting the balance is going from quantitative to qualitative. We need good empirical data and that’s — it’s not easy to get to, but you got to want to get there and we want to get there. I think E.J. is a great person to do it. I’ve known him for years. He’s high integrity, data-driven, the ruthless truth pursuer.”