This Gen Z economist has the finance world buzzing with his data-driven discoveries

If Joseph “Joey” Politano had to pick one word to describe our current economic conditions, it would be messy, he says. 

The Gen Z economist created the Apricitas newsletter in June 2021 to make sense of that mess and help others do the same. Today, 28,000 readers—including Princeton economist Paul Krugman—read the data-driven macroeconomic explainers that Politano publishes multiple times a week, many of them subscribing for $15 per month. Housing, energy, banking, manufacturing: After a decade of low interest rates and relative stability, nearly every sector is now grappling with topsy-turvy trend lines and murky economic forecasts. 

“A lot of my work is just trawling through these weird, random government databases or regional [Federal Reserve] banks,” says Politano, who describes his job as “gold digging.” He has a knack for finding data that brings coherence to a world in flux. Using that data to put together just one chart in an Apricitas post can take hours, but to Politano—and, evidently, his readers plus more than 50,000 Twitter followers—it’s worth it. This is because, rather than just presenting his discovery as his traditional business media rivals might, he paints a big-picture perspective.

In a February post, for example, Politano, a former financial analyst at the Bureau of Labor Statistics, cited a monthly survey of business owners’ inflation expectations conducted by the Atlanta Federal Reserve. Since 2012, the survey respondents, including many Southeast manufacturers, had expected inflation to hold steady at around 2%. But starting in late 2020, they reported an escalating change in expectations. (Those expectations have since dropped from their late-2022 highs.) “Politano discovered that their views were more closely predictive of rising inflation rates than the data sources considered sacrosanct by other economic analysts. Readers making decisions about their own businesses relish these insights.