| I feel that it is my duty to keep you up to date on the latest numbers. And today, those numbers are 6-7. Not sixty-seven, “six seven,” a meme that is probably on its last legs, considering I’m typing these words in a business publication. Like most brain-rotted TikTokisms, there is no easy way to explain what 6-7 means. I could tell you that it was first uttered in a song called “Doot Doot” by Skrilla, which has 10 million views on YouTube. I could tell you said song was used in countless edits of pro basketball player LaMelo Ball, who is six feet, seven inches tall. And I could tell you that everyone, from dance teachers to middle school educators, is fighting just to do their jobs while the kids in their orbit go feral over the two numbers. If none of that is adding up to you, that’s fine. Actually, it’s the point. [1] Sometimes a confusing number is just that: a confusing number. Take the 910,000 jobs the Bureau of Labor Statistics apparently over-counted in the 12 months to March. But unlike the 6-7 meme, few are laughing about the payroll revision, save for the conspiracy theorists and recession doomsayers: “Counting all the people at work in a country the size of the US isn’t easy,” writes John Authers, but he says the latest chasm in the data “does nothing to salve confidence.” If you recall, the integrity of the BLS has been repeatedly called into question by the Trump administration. Vice President JD Vance said the data has become “useless” and Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer thinks the numbers will only add to the qualms around government statistics. But Jonathan Levin says “neither of those interpretations is quite right.” The simplest takeaway from the revision is that the economy is not doing too hot, and Jonathan says we already knew that: “Few people thought that this labor market was firing on all cylinders ... If anything, the numbers provide some further vindication for the Federal Reserve,” he writes. As for the cooking-the-books-to-make-Trump-look-bad conspiracies, Jonathan says “the Trump administration is setting [the BLS] up as a scapegoat for unfavorable data that may emerge in the coming months.” But in reality, it’s a resource problem: “The statistics bureau remains terminally underfunded, a situation that is only getting worse under the Republican budget.” Looking at the data, Justin Fox says it’s clear that the post-pandemic jobs boom is over, “but with lots of revisions to come and the unemployment rate — which is derived from a different monthly survey and never revised — making only a slight upward move since Trump took office, it’s too early to conclude that the US economy has landed in a Trump slump.” In other words: Buckle up for more confusing numbers. Bonus Economic Reading: The Supreme Court just allowed the president to fire a member of the Federal Trade Commission. Is the Fed next? — Stephen L. Carter America’s Cooked and China’s Booked | Elsewhere in confounding figures, here’s a statistic that makes no sense: The federal government sends oil, gas and coal producers around $35 billion in subsidies every. single. year. In Mark Gongloff’s eyes, it sure looks like the US government is bankrolling fossil-fuel behemoths at a time when the country should be going all-in on clean energy. The “One, Big Beautiful Bill” championed by Trump? Yeah, Mark says that was a $40 billion check written to the industry at the taxpayer’s expense, giving fossil fuel producers the freedom to pump as they please and ruin the planet for the next decade. Meanwhile in China, David Fickling says Xi Jinping is sitting at the helm of a mean, green, battery-building machine. “Green energy projects are bringing jobs, growth and cheap electricity to the developing world,” he writes. To give you a sense of how booked and busy the country is, he says China’s green-technology industry has committed more than $227 billion in foreign direct investments over the last three years. “That’s roughly the size, adjusted for inflation, of the post-World War II Marshall Plan that cemented the alliance between the US and Europe.” The MARSHALL Plan!!!! David sees this as Part II of China’s energy transition, Part I being exports of finished products — solar panels, batteries, EVS and the like. Over the past 20 years, China’s auto sector has ballooned to great heights, employing about 5.6 million people. “Today there are about 150 different brands producing passenger vehicles in China,” Juliana Liu says in her inaugural column for Bloomberg Opinion. But too much growth comes at a cost: “The sector is now looking for new markets because it’s too large and unwieldy at home,” which is exactly what happened a century ago in — you guessed it — the US. Ugh. | 
