After some blog traffic last month on economic indicators -- not to mention EconomicIndicators.gov -- it was interesting to see the article in this Sunday's New York Times on "the indicators the federal number crunchers produce." The piece paraphrases Charles Biderman, the founder and chief executive of TrimTabs Investment Research: [D]ata from the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Bureau of Economic Analysis rely on outdated figures and outmoded methods. (Both agencies have been roundly criticized for years about these problems)... the monthly employment analyses put out by the Bureau of Labor Statistics [are] based on flawed surveys and extrapolation of historical data. No surprise, he says, that the initial figures from the bureau are so often adjusted significantly later on. Biderman is on a campaign to encourage policy analysts and others to enter the real world and junk their reliance on surveys and extrapolations of historical data that don't reflect reality... There is real-time data available, but they don't want to look at it. One of the reasons why the dollar sells at a discount is people have no faith in the data coming out of Washington.