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Two federal series describe U.S. goods imports from China every month, and neither contains a tariff. The Bureau of Labor Statistics prices what the foreign seller charges. The Census Bureau reports what U.S. Customs and Border Protection appraises the same goods at. Because the duty is absent from both, dividing one by the other strips the price term out of the trade numbers and leaves something neither agency publishes. The July 2026 import price release, issued August 18, 2026, put the price index for imports from China 2.7 percent above its July 2025 level. Eight months earlier, in the November 2025 data released January 15, 2026, it sat 3.6 percent below its year-earlier level. Both Measurements Stop Before the Duty Is Assessed The BLS question-and-answer page states: "The prices for the items used to calculate the Import/Export Price Indexes exclude duties." The reason is a national-accounts requirement, stated in the Handbook of Methods: "For example, import...

Two Estimates of One Quarter, and a 241 Billion Dollar Gap On August 26, 2026, the Bureau of Economic Analysis published its second estimate of second-quarter output. Real gross domestic product increased at an annual rate of 1.5 percent . Real gross domestic income increased 2.2 percent . The average of the two, which BEA also publishes, increased 1.8 percent . These are not three views of three different things. They are three arithmetic treatments of one quarter. GDP counts what was spent on final output. GDI, in BEA's glossary, is "the costs incurred and the incomes earned in the production of gross domestic product (GDP)" ; BEA's primer on the accounts lists its four components as "compensation of employees," "taxes on production and imports less subsidies," "net operating surplus," and "consumption of fixed capital." In the national accounting framework the two totals are definitionally equal. The difference between...

The Electric Power Monthly released on August 26, 2026 put the U.S. residential average price of electricity at 18.34 cents per kilowatthour for June 2026, against 17.47 cents in June 2025, a rise of 4.98 percent. The all-sector average over the twelve months ending June 2026 was 14.05 cents, against 13.22 cents a year earlier — a move of 0.83 cents , or 6.3 percent. The argument around those numbers has narrowed to one question: whether new data center load moved them. That question is being asked of a table that was not built to answer it. The series can be pushed far — far enough to say what did and did not mechanically move the national average — but not that far. The published price is a ratio, not a rate EIA defines the figure directly, and the underlying collection is Form EIA-861M. Average revenue per kilowatthour is "calculated by dividing the total monthly revenue by the corresponding total monthly sales for each sector and geographic area." It is not a tari...

A central bank publishes a reserves figure once a month. Wire copy carries it as a single number with a month-on-month change attached, analysts turn it into months of import cover, and sovereign credit commentary cites it as a buffer. Very little of that engages with a basic fact: the number is one line of a four-section statistical return, and the other three sections exist because that one line was once shown to be misleading. The return is the IMF's Data Template on International Reserves and Foreign Currency Liquidity, usually shortened to IRFCL. It was folded into the Special Data Dissemination Standard in March 2000, four years after the SDDS itself was established, and the reason is not obscure. In its own retrospective on the 1997–98 programmes in Indonesia, Korea and Thailand, the IMF wrote that gross reserves were a poor indicator of available international liquidity given the magnitude of liabilities set against these reserves, many appearing off-balance sheet , and ...