EconPlot has no anchor, no columnist and no house view. What it has instead is a rule that every number can be traced back to the place it came from — and machinery that refuses to publish a script that breaks it. This page is that rule, in full.
Every figure comes from a primary public source, quoted at a stated date. We do not cite other people's articles about the data; we cite the data.
| Source | What we take from it |
|---|---|
| Federal Reserve Economic Data (FRED) | The series themselves — interest rates, prices, employment, output — downloaded, not retyped |
| Bureau of Labor Statistics | Consumer prices, unemployment, payrolls, labour-force participation |
| Bureau of Economic Analysis | GDP, personal consumption, the trade balance |
| Energy Information Administration | Crude oil and retail fuel prices |
| Securities and Exchange Commission filings | Company figures, quoted with the accession number of the filing they came from |
| Published fund holdings | Index weights, quoted with the date of the holdings file |
Two details that matter more than they sound. A company figure without its filing is an assertion, so ours carry the accession number. And an index weight is only true on a date, so ours carry the date. Economic series are also revised after publication, sometimes substantially — we date every figure rather than quietly restating old ones.
Before a script becomes a video, it is read by an automated reviewer against fifteen separate rules — one rule per check, because a single long style guide is something a person skims and a machine cannot enforce. A script that fails the mechanical ones is not built at all.
A finished script claimed a recession is "only official long after it starts" — true — but placed that conclusion immediately after a chart showing the economy growing, where it did not follow from what the viewer had just been shown. A check caught the gap. After three attempts to fix it, the piece was dropped rather than published. The measure of an editorial process is what it stops.
We say this plainly because you should be able to weigh it. EconPlot explainers are produced by an automated pipeline: the narration and some of the imagery are AI-generated, and each video discloses that in its description. The pipeline chooses nothing about what is true — the figures come from the sources above, the checks above run on every script, and a person reviews a draft before it is released. Charts are drawn from the data files themselves at build time, so the line you see is the series, not an artist's impression of it.
Sponsored content is always labelled as sponsored, in the content itself, in line with the Federal Trade Commission's Endorsement Guides. A sponsor approves their own copy and nothing else: they do not see editorial before publication, do not approve it, and have no influence over which numbers we report or how we describe them. We do not take sponsorship from anyone asking us to recommend a trade, a token or a security.
We will, eventually. When we do: we correct the piece, say what was wrong rather than quietly editing it, and note it in the next briefing. If you think something here is wrong, tell us at corrections@econplot.com — a correction with a source attached is the most useful mail we can get.