One of the great economic myths is that markets are rational. Not a day passes without this myth being disproved scores of times, but the myth persists. For example, today (March 14) Bank of America/Merrill…
Tag: rate
There is no means of avoiding a final collapse of a boom brought about by credit expansion. The alternative is only whether the crisis should come sooner as the result of voluntary abandonment of further…
The most recent unemployment number is a total lie, and that lie was repeated all over the mainstream media (MSM). Two sins were committed here, and I don’t know which one is worse. The report…
Last Friday (January 27) the US Bureau of Economic Analysis announced its advance estimate that in the last quarter of 2011 the economy grew at an annual rate of 2.8% in real inflation-adjusted terms, an increase from the annual rate of growth in the third quarter. Good news, right? Wrong. If you want to know what is really happening, you must turn to John Williams at www.shadowstats.com. What the presstitute media did not tell us is that almost the entire gain In GDP growth was due to “involuntary inventory build-up,” that is, more goods were produced than were sold. Net of the unsold goods, the annualized real growth rate was eight-tenths of one percent.
And even that tiny growth rate is an exaggeration, because it is deflated with a measure of inflation that understates inflation. The US government’s measure of inflation no longer measures a constant standard of living. Instead, the government’s inflation measure relies on substitution of cheaper goods for those that rise in price. In other words, the government holds the measure of inflation down by measuring a declining standard of living. This permits our rulers to divert cost-of-living-adjustments that should be paid to Social Security recipients to wars of aggression, police state, and banker bailouts.
No one expects the Fed to announce a rate-hike at the end of the today’s FOMC meeting, but that doesn’t mean there won’t be a few surprises. The problem is that the recovery has stalled…