Marketplace®

Daily business news and economic stories
Episode 1447Aug 13, 2025

China has an economic data problem. Is the U.S. next?

Marketplace’s China correspondent Jennifer Pak shares her experience with unreliable government statistics.

Download
China has an economic data problem. Is the U.S. next?
Cheng Xin/Getty Images

Subscribe:

Since President Trump’s firing of the Bureau of Labor Statistics commissioner over a weak jobs report, we’ve been thinking a lot about the trustworthiness of U.S. economic data. Other countries like China can offer a glimpse of what happens when that trust erodes. On the show today, Marketplace’s China correspondent Jennifer Pak explains how she works around unreliable data when reporting on the Chinese economy. Plus, could the United States be headed in the same direction?

Here’s everything we talked about today:

The Team