I believe that change is the cover story to prevent a cascading bank failure. We made it illegal to go to work for a year, we were at a serious risk of a deflat

I believe that change is the cover story to prevent a cascading bank failure. We made it illegal to go to work for a year, we were at a serious risk of a deflationary spiral and the fed did a LOT to flood the economy with dollars. That appears to be one of them. Similarly, if you go look at the M1 money supply chart you see that vertical line. The average person goes "WTH!!" and they are told "The vertical line is where we changed how the M1 is calculated" and the average person goes back to sleep. But even a middle schooler knows you can't just arbitrarily change how the Y axis is calculated mid-stream. It makes the chart useless. They could have back-filled with the new way of calculating or forward-calculated with the old way for some period of time. The chart is useless on purpose. It's friction between an average viewer and understanding what happened in the economy. And only "weirdos" and "conspiracy theorists" bother to overcome the friction to try to figure out what goes on.