It’s a curious phenomenon that when someone’s post is flagged, instead of the flagged person reflecting on why the post violated the forum rules, they come up with the most extraordinary explanations for why the post was removed. “Censorship,” “taboo,” etc.
The investment forum rules state first and foremost:
“1. Maintaining high-quality and civil discussion
Always strive to improve the discussion in some way, no matter how small the act. If you are unsure whether your message adds value to the conversation, it is better not to post it. Respect the topics and the people discussing them, even if you disagree on something.”
I personally try to avoid sending a message if I feel it doesn’t add value to the discussion. I don’t always succeed in this, of course. I haven’t seen your post, but I assume it was in the “Stock Market Direction” (Pörssien suunta) thread, which we try to maintain as a high-quality thread; here is the opening post of the thread:
I haven’t seen the post, but if that was the only content of the message, then please read your post again. What is analytical about it? What value does it add to the discussion?
With a very quick Google search, I found that US Bureau of Labor Statistics news: https://www.bls.gov/news.release/cpi.nr0.htm
Looking at it briefly, I found a comment like this: “BLS did not collect survey data for October 2025 due to a lapse in appropriations. BLS was unable to retroactively collect these data. For a few indexes, BLS uses nonsurvey data sources instead of survey data to make the index calculations. BLS was able to retroactively acquire most of the nonsurvey data for October. CPI data collection resumed on November 14, 2025."
So we can conclude from this that the inflation data is based on about two weeks of data, which included Black Friday. I won’t dig any deeper right now, but based on this two-minute analysis, I could argue that this inflation data is not very reliable. If you had bothered to look into the matter this much before your comment, and posted this as context, for example, I believe your message would not have been deleted.
No taboo has been revealed, nor any larger question of principle, but rather a message that violates the forum rules, which has been removed for a very good reason. Yes, laypeople are allowed to question US figures (and everything else), but it must be done with reasoning and in a proper manner. Just like any other questioning. Throwaway remarks like “scientific or Trumpian numbers” and “dictatorship” add no value to the discussion; instead, in the worst case, they derail the conversation and lower the quality of the discussion. But if there is other substantive content in the post besides these worthless remarks, my understanding is that these are often overlooked quite a bit. And it doesn’t matter if we’re talking about the right or left, Trump or Biden, and so on. That is why I assume such messages are referred to as tinfoil hat theories. And as you already said, that’s probably why even Powell said, as you linked, that it should be treated with skepticism—likely for the reason I mentioned above.