Haha thank you!

7/ Lots more in there, do take a peek notes.archie-hall.com/p/fifteen-t...

6/ And even after the OBR's growth downgrade, it's still one of the sunniest forecasters on the British economy.

5/ What we did get was the return of a few Jeremy Hunt classics. Frozen thresholds and fiscal drag are back. So are cuts to unprotected departments outside the spending review horizon. The temptation to fiddle is eternal.

4/ The actual policies announced in the Budget mostly weren't huge. Another year, another missed opportunity on tax reform.

Nothing, for instance, from the very good wish list here: cps.org.uk/wp-content/...

3/ So far, it doesn't look like it much has. Hence the slim pickings of concrete public service improvements that the chancellor was able to point to. Obviously, these things take time. But still worrying.

2/ But, add this together with last year's budget, and you can see pretty clearly that Labour is betting on a bigger state.

The question for the government is whether all that money can actually make a difference.

Agreed, DMP work was fascinating

www.economist.com/leaders/200...

We're fortunate, then, that the shutdown looks like it's ending and that the attacks on the independence of the BLS have diminished. No substitute for government data quite yet.

Here's the link to the full piece again: www.economist.com/finance-and...

That chart above is also a comparatively generous perspective. Zoom in on the one-month level (i.e. release-to-release) and initial ADP prints are pretty much entirely uncorrelated with initial private payrolls prints (and somewhat, but not vastly, correlated with final prints).

Another issue is that private-sector data tends to benchmark itself heavily to the official stuff.

That means even the better sources, like ADP's payrolls measure, look a lot worse when you look at the actual initial releases, not the final revisions.

A bit more on one paper that does a more rigorous job than my chart in teasing that all out
x.com/ArchieHall/...

One simply proxy for whether government data still matters is whether it moves markets. Over the past few years, government data has been more market-moving that ever.

The trouble is that even in places with plenty of solid alternatives (like payrolls), they rarely agree.

Further down, a very quick 🧵 with a few more highlights.