2008-05-02

Manipulated figures coming from official US governement offices

For quite some time now, the US government has been manipulating its official figures in order to make them look as good as possible and bypass the limits of its actions. For example, why not provide a wrong figure for inflation in order to be able to lower interest rate? Money Supply is increasing at in astronomical rate and there's actually a formula that cannot be manipulated in order to provide a lower figure? Well, let's just stop providing it!

The good news is that Shadow Stats has been calculating and providing alternate data for the unemployment rate, GDP growth and inflation as well as continuing to build the M3 for Money Supply:
  • M3 would be growing at 18% a year this rate is going up, which means that money supply is growing exponentially
  • Official unemployment rate of 5% is actually well below the 9% provided by the broadest definition of the BLS and still well below the 13% as reported by Shadow Stats
  • Shadow Stats shows that YoY change in the GDP of the USA have been flat or negative since 1990, and is now shriking at a rate of -2.xx %. I am not a subscriber so I don't know how they calculate those figures, but I guess they take into consideration the huge amount of dept that has been financing the "growth" of the US and by discounting the dept, you get a nice and unpleasant surprise.
  • The most important figure and the most open to tinkering is the CPI which includes a huge amount of "hedonism" in it. So official figures tell us that the CPI has been moving in the 2-4% band since 1991 while the alternate CPI provided by Shadow Stats shows that the CPI as been steadily growing from 5% in 1992 to about 12% now. Again, this figure being a rate of change, its raise means that prices are growing exponentially.

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