The global economy is stronger than you think

IN financial markets there is an adage: "you can't trust Chinese data". This is unfair to China - not because Chinese data is reliable, but because economic data from other countries is also unreliable. Data in the US and in Europe is being revised more often than in the past, and the revisions are generally larger than they were in the past.

What particularly matters for investors is that there is a bias to data revisions. Since 2010 inflation and growth numbers have usually been revised higher than originally reported. Indeed the revisions are even more significant than that.

In recent years, data that was originally reported as weaker than expected has been revised to data that is stronger than originally expected. The revision process is reversing the way in which data should surprise investors.