The entire financial world is holding its breath right now, waiting to see whether they can continue their trust in official U.S. government economic figures or not. Will things like the official unemployment rate and inflation rate become just another casualty in Donald Trump's war on the truth and his war on science, or will the professionals who produce these numbers (as opposed to the agency's leader) continue to do a good and honest job -- even with the threat of being fired now hanging over their heads? That is an unanswered question, but we will begin to see fairly quickly which direction the Bureau of Labor Statistics is going to head.

Over the course of the next month, there are multiple scheduled data releases before the next monthly jobs report comes out (usually on the first Friday after the end of a month, which would make it September 5th). There will be one more big jobs report and two inflation reports released in that time, and you can bet people will be watching closely to see whether they can be trusted or not.

The mid-month jobs report is actually the first part of an annual report, which goes back over the past year and revises numbers, by matching what the Bureau came up with to actual unemployment data from the state-level unemployment offices. Revisions can go up or down, naturally. But because the time period is an entire year, the total number of such revisions (when all added together) can be a lot higher than the usual monthly numbers.

Each month, data is released for the past three months. The new data is for the previous month (last Friday, this covered the month of July). The other two earlier months' numbers are revised, if necessary (covering June and May, from last Friday). The reason for this revision is that the way unemployment data is crunched is to survey lots and lots of businesses and then extrapolate from their hard employment numbers. But the bigger businesses tend to report quickly while the smaller ones take longer. So data was still trickling in for May and June last month, and their numbers were revised accordingly.

Then, once a year, there is a two-step process to revise the entire previous 12-month period. This revision starts with an initial report in August and then a final report in February. So that's what will be appearing this month -- the initial review of the past year.

The annual review sometimes has a whole bunch of revisions in it. This happened last year, in fact. Donald Trump, since he does not care in the least about the truth, has been lying about this as part of his reason for firing the head of the B.L.S. last Friday. By his telling of the tale, the B.L.S. was run by a woman who was some sort of far-left lunatic (even though she had been confirmed by a vote of 86 senators, including JD Vance and Marco Rubio). Because she was such a lefty, she "rigged" the numbers to help Democrats win the election (by making them look better). But then after the election, she announced a massive reduction of more than 800,000 jobs. Since Trump had won already, it didn't matter politically anymore and so she 'fessed up (in his telling of this tall tale).

There's only one thing wrong with all of that, and that is the revision he is talking about happened last August. August, you will note, falls before November on the calendar. So her revision downwards of 800,000-plus jobs came at a time when (politically-speaking) it would have done either Joe Biden or Kamala Harris the maximum possible political damage, being less than three months before the election happened. This is an inconvenient fact in the way Trump tells the story, so he just changes reality around to suit his fantasy. August somehow happened after November last year, and everyone just didn't notice. Or something.

But as you can see from this delusional tale, the annual report can make so many adjustments for each individual month that it adds up to a large amount of jobs -- either more jobs were created than previously reported, or fewer. So if this year's annual adjustment shows that fewer jobs were created in any portion of the first six months of Trump's second term, he is going to go ballistic. He just fired the head of B.L.S. for a revision of only a little over 250,000 jobs, after all.

Then there are the inflation numbers. Mid-month, the inflation number that everyone casually uses is reported. Then towards the end of the month, the "core inflation" numbers are reported (the ones that the Federal Reserve and the market pay more attention to). Neither one of these indicators is moving in the right direction, at least using last month as a guide. The standard measure of inflation went up from 2.4 percent to 2.7 percent last month. The core inflation number was even higher. Both rose more than analysts expected.

The target for these numbers -- what the Fed wants to achieve, to put this another way -- is a flat 2.0 percent. The numbers had been heading downward, but have now ticked up. This could be just a minor one-month blip (the rate has been oscillating around 3.0 percent for roughly the past two years, for context, after coming down sharply from the spike in the summer of 2022). Or it could be the beginning of a trend. Most economists are predicting it is indeed the start of a trend, as Trump's tariffs work their way onto actual prices on actual store shelves. Tariffs are nothing more than a sales tax, really, although it has taken time for them to work all the way through the supply chain to the consumer.

What is going to happen if the inflation number tops 3.0 percent? The markets will react badly to such news, and Trump will (once again) go ballistic. According to him, inflation is now at "nothing," so this would once again contradict his fantasy of where the economy stands and how it is reacting to his flailing trade war with the rest of the planet.

As I write this, the second-in-command at the B.L.S. is now the acting head of the agency. In other words, a competent person is in charge right now. But Trump has said he's going to appoint someone "within three or four days" to take over, so by the time some of these numbers appear, a Trump toady could be in place.

So what happens if Trump goes ballistic again over bad economic news from the B.L.S.? If they're smart, whomever Trump does name will just shift all the blame onto the previous head, by saying: "All those numbers were already in the pipeline, therefore I had nothing to do with them." However, this political excuse to Trump will only last so long. By the time September dawns, Trump is going to be expecting some happy numbers to appear from his newly-named B.L.S. head.

This is where things are going to get dicey, no matter what happens. Either the numbers will be reported honestly, and if they are bad, Trump will be incensed -- which means he'll probably just go right ahead and fire whomever he is about to name to run the agency. Or the numbers will not be reported honestly, which will lead to a crisis of confidence in the markets the likes of which this country has never seen before. If the unemployment and inflation numbers are just picked out of thin air to blow sunshine up Trump's skirt, then it will become very hard for market prognosticators to have any idea of what the economy is really doing out there. Fear will run rampant.

One thing leaves me at least a little bit hopeful, in all of this. And that is the fact that the head of the B.L.S. has virtually nothing to do with the production of the actual data. It's not like all the underlings feed numbers into the chief's computer, who then performs some secret magic to calculate the final number. In fact, hundreds of professionals work on these calculations and they come up with the final numbers and then just hand them over to the boss, whose only real influence over them is in the wording of the press release which accompanies them.

So if a Trump toady truly does try to fudge the numbers, a whole lot of people who work for the B.L.S. are going to know about it right away. And since their own professional reputations will be on the line, I would think that at least some of them are going to speak up because they are offended (or even outraged) over someone politically manipulating the data that they work so hard to accurately create. Whether this comes in the form of anonymous leaks to the media or official whistleblower complaints to Congress or even to mass resignations, the story is bound to come out. Again, these people's entire job is to strive for accuracy in these numbers, so if some political flunky comes along and says to them: "No, that's too negative, the Dear Leader won't like it -- change it until the numbers make him happy," they are going to balk.

So hopefully if this sort of political manipulation of data does happen, the story will be told almost immediately. At least we'll know that the numbers can't be trusted, which is marginally better than just guessing whether they're made-up or not.

Sooner or later we will once again have a president who isn't a whiny little toddler who always has to have his own way (or he'll flip the game board over, scattering all the pieces everywhere), and government agencies can go back to being dedicated to the truth. But that is obviously not going to happen for a while, so whatever happens over the next month will be worth watching like a hawk.

-- Chris Weigant

Follow Chris on Twitter: @ChrisWeigant