That exactly supports what I was saying. The definition change was a bureaucratic immune response, allowing plausible deniability around unfavorable comparisons

That exactly supports what I was saying. The definition change was a bureaucratic immune response, allowing plausible deniability around unfavorable comparisons. If an everyman were to look at FRED and see an M1 hockey stick, he may reasonably think “look at all this money they’re printing!” A fact checker would point out the everyman’s graph is misleading: it includes a definition change which inflates recent values. But the money printing was actually unprecedented, and the fake graph told you more of the truth than the factcheck.