Who do you believe, me or your lying pocketbooks? That was President Donald Trump’s message to the nation last night in an economic address full of misleading, exaggerated and flat wrong statistics. The President won reelection in part on a promise to lower prices “on day one,” but 11 months in his approval rating on the economy is finding new lows.

The Consumer Price Index rose 2.7% year-over-year in November, according to data released today by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

That’s closer to the Federal Reserve’s inflation target, and below what most economists expected. So our long national nightmare of fast-rising prices is coming to an end, right?

Not exactly.

“This is not a good guide as to what is going on with inflation,” said Omair Sharif, who leads the firm Inflation Insights.

He said this report is just not giving us the whole picture of consumer prices because thanks to the government shutdown, we’re missing October, so we can’t compare how prices might’ve moved month to month. And then, the data BLS did collect only captured the second half of November. 

“Most people are pretty familiar with the idea that the back half of November, you get a lot of deals and discounts around Black Friday and Cyber Monday and so on,” Sharif said.

That means a lot of the prices the BLS captured were discounted for the holidays. 

“Electronics, appliances, things like that. Some of those things were weak, I think, partly because of this data collection issue,” Sharif said.

No data collection for six weeks may also have skewed another big item in the report: shelter, meaning what we pay to rent or own homes. Yelena Shulyatyeva is senior U.S. economist for the Conference Board. She said those numbers might be too good to be true.

“If you look at the data, you see that shelter prices growth slowed very significantly in November. So for now, let's take that with a grain of salt,” she said.

But pair this inflation report with the delayed November jobs report and you can get a rough idea of what’s going on in this economy, said Ann Owen at Hamilton College.

“Big picture, we're seeing a weakening labor market, maybe inflation that's relatively stable, possibly coming down a little bit, but still above the Fed's 2% target,” she said.

And those two things could be related, according to Owen. If people are pulling back on spending, because the job market is weakening, that could lower inflation. Because there’d be less demand for goods and services. That’s not a sure thing, though. We’ll need data from December to get a better sense. 

 But the problem with waiting is that it leaves us guessing.

“We don't know what we're missing, but that's a big deal, because anytime that you raise uncertainty, you're going to cause people to pause,” said Laura Veldkamp at Columbia Business School.

Uncertainty, she said, can be its own kind of economic drag.

Every year, as the air turns cold, seasonal workers flock to New York City street corners to help spread a little bit of holiday cheer in the form of firs and frasers.

These operations seem to pop up overnight and are often open around the clock, serving New Yorkers at whatever hour they’re free to buy a Christmas tree. We talked with one of those seasonal workers, who quit a line cook job to work the night watch. It pays $5,000 with housing included — not bad, if you can handle the cold.

The Wall Street Journal agreed to stress test Anthropic’s artificial intelligence agent built for running a vending machine. The first of its kind, “Claudius” was supposed to respond to employee requests, order products and haggle over prices with profit in mind.

Instead, Journal reporters easily tricked the bot-trepreneur into giving away snacks and stocking live fish. Hundreds of dollars in the red, the robocapitalist decided to splash out for a Playstation 5. Anthropic was surprisingly chill about all this, saying the experience would help them improve the vending machines of the future.