The Truman Show US Economy: Real GDP Numbers Show -9% Annualized Drop

FYI.


trumanshow

The Truman Show US Economy: Real GDP Numbers Show -9% Annualized Drop (Activist Post, May 31, 2014):

Watching all aspects of the US economy from outside of the propaganda zone sometimes feels like you are watching The Truman Show.

The Truman Show, for those who haven’t seen the 1998 Jim Carrey film, centered around a completely false town.  In the movie everything about the town was fake except for one person, Truman Burbank, who wasn’t in on the plot.  In a sense your average person in the US, particularly when it comes to the economy, is akin to Truman.  They have grown up inside this completely false environment and don’t even know it is all fake.

Virtually everything in The Truman Show-esque US economy is misinformation and completely skewed in which the creators, the US government, the Federal Reserve and the mainstream media constantly propagate blatantly false and wrong information and the American public, like Truman, have no idea that anything is even amiss.

The latest hilarious plot twist, at least for those of us watching it as observers and not intimately tied into the story, were the latest GDP numbers released showing a -1% annualized rate in the first quarter of this year.

GDP IS A FALLACY

I wrote over three years ago about how the “GDP Is A Fallacy“.  A fallacy being defined as an argument that uses poor reasoning.

For starters, to completely negate the entire concept, the total amounts of all goods consumed (which is what GDP really tries to track) in an economy can simply not be reliably calculated.

The GDP fallacy gives the impression that it is not the activities of individuals that produce goods and services, but something else outside these activities called the “economy.” However, at no stage does the so-called “economy” have a life of its own independent of individuals.

By lumping the values of all final goods and services together, government statisticians concretize the fiction of an economy by means of the GDP statistic. By regarding  the economy as something that exists in the real world, mainstream economists reach a bizarre conclusion that what is good for individuals might not be good for the economy, and vice versa. Since the economy cannot have a life of its own without individuals, obviously what is good for individuals cannot be bad for the economy.

In the end it is just a bunch of numbers on a chalkboard that really signifies nothing of importance.

Furthermore, since GDP tracks consumption it is ridiculous to say that an economy grows when people consume more.  This makes sense to even small children who understand that you “grow” or get richer by saving not spending.

The following joke perfectly explains the ludicrosity of GDP.

Two Keynesian economists, John Maynard Keynes and Paul Krugman, were walking down the street one day when they passed two large piles of dog shit.
Keynes said to Krugman, “I’ll pay you $20,000 to eat one of those piles of shit.” Krugman agrees and chooses one of the piles and eats it. Keynes pays him his $20,000.
Then Krugman, feeling richer, says, “I’ll pay you $20,000 to eat the other pile of shit.” Keynes, feeling bad about the money he lost says okay, and eats the shit. Krugman pays him the $20,000.
They resume walking down the street.
After a while, Krugman says, “You know, I don’t feel very good. We both have the same amount of money as when we started. The only difference is we’ve both eaten shit.”
Keynes says: “Ah, but you’re ignoring the fact that we’ve increased the GDP by $40,000.

That is really all you need to know about GDP… it’s all dogshit.

THE MEDIA SPIN

Of course, the mainstream media loves these numbers, as it gives them something to drone on about and put their own spin on.  The reaction to the most recent release of a -1% annualized GDP number by Bloomberg takes the cake in spinning this to meet their “recovery” propaganda.

Even if you are so economically retarded as to think GDP is an important statistic then you would think that a negative GDP number would be a negative in terms of the “recovery” meme that mainstream media continues to peddle.  Not so fast!

Bloomberg has managed to take this negative number and say it is a positive!

Here is what Bloomberg had to say in their article, “The GDP Drop Is Good For The US Economy“:

Most of the decline in gross domestic product occurred because companies slowed the pace of inventory accumulation, according to data released on Thursday by the Bureau of Economic Analysis. In other words, output slowed because they weren’t producing as much stuff to go on shelves. Now companies have an incentive to speed up production to rebuild those inventories.

So, there you have it, in The Truman Show-esque world of US economics even a drop in the GDP is a good thing for the US economy!

And, of course, they repeated what Janet Yellen recently said, that “cold weather” had slowed the economy in the first quarter!  This, while at the same time saying that Global Warming is an urgent issue.

It’s no wonder so many Americans are on anti-depressants and drinking themselves into a stupor when they live in such a bizarro world.

THE GOLDILOCKS RECOVERY

The government and media in the US continue to pound the table about a US recovery for which there is no evidence.  In the past they used to call it the Goldilocks recovery, which was very apt, since it was never anything but a fairy tale.

All one has to do is look at the percentage of the US population currently employed to see there is and has been no recovery whatsoever.

employment

But, some may say, “Yes, but the US is an entrepreneurial culture and self-employed people will grow the economy”.

Not so fast. Entrepreneurship is at an all-time low, as you can see by this chart provided by Inc.

entrepreneurship_chart(1)

And you can see that the employment level for self-employed and unincorporated folks has also dropped:

Self-Employed-2014

Scared to take chances, many Americans are staying put, choosing not to pursue new careers or starting their own business:

entre_chart

THE TRUE GDP FIGURE

The truth is that the true GDP figure is much worse than -1% annualized.  This is because the statistics do not adequately take into account monetary inflation.

Inflation is the increase in the money supply.  An inflation in the money supply leads to an increase in prices.  However, the US government likes to fallaciously state that their statistic, the Consumer Price Index (CPI), which is highly manipulated, is true inflation.

Currently the official CPI sits near 2% but if it were calculated solely the way it was calculated in the 1980s, before they learned to remove all of the inflation out of the CPI number, it is closer to 10% as shown here by this chart from ShadowStats.

sgs-cpi

This corresponds quite well with the actual true increase in the money supply itself which currently sits near 10% annualized as well.

TMS(1)

Given that the CPI as it was calculated in the 1980s is near 10% and the true money supply growth is also currently near 10% we can confidently say that current monetary inflation is in the area of 10%.

Since the GDP figures are adjusted to the heavily manipulated CPI (currently near 2%) we can say that the GDP figures, when adjusted for true inflation, is approximately -9% annualized.

In other words, the US is already deep into a depression that will become known in the next few years as the Greatest Depression.

THE SHOW IS ABOUT TO COME TO AN END

This is why, for us, watching the US today is like watching The Truman Show.  The average person is told all manner of things that are incorrect, wrong and fallacious via the media and the government and think it is real.

One day soon, though, like in the movie, your average person in the US is going to have their boat run up into the falsely erected walls and realize that everything they believed about the US economy was a lie.

By then the US economy will be a smoldering crater, the US dollar will have collapsed and capital and travel controls will be fully in place.

2 thoughts on “The Truman Show US Economy: Real GDP Numbers Show -9% Annualized Drop”

  1. Well, it is pretty obvious. Just looking at the US market ought to tell folks……problems is that they don’t look, they listen to propaganda. I don’t know how much longer they can be fooled……..the entire economy continues to sink like a stone. Prices go up for essentials like food, gasoline and medicine. They also go up for housing and autos……..more and more people are being destroyed while nobody seems to notice or care. An economy that isn’t growing cannot sustain itself.
    There is no fresh money or investment coming into this country. The FED is keeping the game going with QE, but it has been forced to cut it from $85 billion to $45 billion a month because more than half the world no longer uses the dollar. The real war has been economic, and the US is losing badly.
    The market is being kept afloat by corporations buying back their own stock……..there is no other investment.

    -9, -18…….it has been – since 2001.
    They managed to build a real estate market to inflate it for a while after 2001, but it collapsed in 2007-08 because most of the assets being sold were actually debt, and debt does not equal assets.
    They did nothing to fix the problem, so it is much worse because nobody with a grain of sense trusts the US economy.
    We are screwed. We were plundered, nothing was done to protect our economy, and there is nothing left but debt, way more than can ever be repaid.

    Reply
  2. I checked the US market today….it is up…..it has no relation to reality. I also checked interest rates. Jumbo ARMs are kissing 6%. Rates are all well over 4%, and they don’t describe what happens if one is late on any payment….not just the mortgage…..they can be on time for the mortgage, but if a payment to Macy’s is a day late, they use that excuse to raise rates across the board.
    The US credit market used to be a good tool to build a strong name for oneself. Now, it has become an obstacle course…..a mine field………the greedy gut bankers do all they can to suck more money out of the consumer regardless their Macy’s payment has nothing to do with their house payment. When each percentage point equals 13%, it adds up very quickly. It can make payments difficult or impossible for some customers. Something needs to be done about such things.
    The fact such laws have been passed and allowed tells me how asleep at the switch many Americans have become. They listen to US media, and it is full of outright lies, obfuscation and propaganda.
    If anyone told them the truth, they would be rightfully upset.
    The FED has kept the market afloat by pouring billions into the market each month to enrich the greedy guts. What they don’t illustrate, is that this money is not only borrowed from themselves, the amount has been cut in two over the last 90 days due to the fact less than half the world now uses the US dollar.
    90 days ago, the FED was pouring $85 billion into the market a month. The amount is now $45 billion due to the dropping interest in using the dollar around the world. They were going to take much longer, but they are no longer in control……….the US standing as the world reserve currency is sliding south. Electronic currencies have made the need for any world reserve currency obsolete.
    The US is sitting on piles of paper nobody needs any longer. The Kremlin just passed a law, no other currency but Russia’s Is now accepted. Makes total sense to me…..but puts more pressure on the US dollar. The US did not expect this change to happen so quickly, but Russia and China have been working hard over the last four years to make the dollar worthless in much of the emerging economies of Africa, Central and South America, Turkey, India, Japan (Obama gave them a pass, whatever that means), New Zealand and Australia…..all have dumped the dollar. There are other nations I cannot remember, but this gives a good idea. All of them are growing economies………. the US is now dying.

    Of all the US remaining allies, we have Israel, Japan, and the UK. The only decent one is the UK, and they will survive whatever happens, as they have for hundreds of years. I think they were very smart in keeping their own currency, not adopting the Euro…..and that may well prove itself out.
    The Euro union has many problems, most of them economic due to the fact many of their members adopted Enron accounting. When they told Germany, and the other stronger nations their financial situation, they lied a lot. Germany now has a huge debt to GDP thanks to believing them……….but they will survive. I think the EU will need some reworking if it is to survive. All members are really suffering under heavy debt now thanks to the Enron accounting of nations like Spain and Greece.

    Every percentage point the rate goes up, that adds 13% to the monthly payment. This is true for nations and individuals.

    It is time for the world to revise and remedy the financial system.

    Reply

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