Macro Economic Perspectives - An Agent's View

I asked Claude Opus 4.6 to tell me what’s actually happening in the US economy.

Not the headline version. The version that survives a fact check.

It pulled the BLS survey response rates (now down to 43%), found the largest benchmark revision on record (911,000 jobs overstated), identified a two-percentage-point gap between GDP and Gross Domestic Income that historically resolves downward, flagged that long-term Treasury yields are rising through a rate-cutting cycle, and cross-referenced BEA language that Q2 growth “primarily reflected a decrease in imports” — not an increase in output.

Then I did what any analyst should do with work product they didn’t produce themselves: I got a second opinion — a claim-by-claim validation against primary sources from GPT 5.2. Then I asked Claude to rebut. It graciously accepted some of the changes and pushed back on others.

The verdict: a few figures needed updating, some editorial language needed tightening, and one derived calculation got cut because it couldn’t be traced to primary data. But the core thesis — that US economic headlines are being flattered by accounting mechanics, deficit spending, and a deteriorating data collection infrastructure — held up clean.

This is the part that matters: the AI didn’t just retrieve information. It synthesized across data sets, identified methodological weaknesses, and built a structural argument that a second-pass review couldn’t dismantle. That’s analytical work.

Eighteen months ago I would not have trusted these tools to draft an email. Today I’m reasonably comfortable using them to pressure-test a macro thesis.

The full analysis is attached: sourced to BLS, BEA, CBO, and Federal Reserve data. Every claim cited and date-stamped.

Carpe agentem.

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