The economy has been debilitated by the offshoring of middle class jobs for the benefit of corporate profits and by the Federal Reserve’s policy of Quantitative Easing in order to support a few oversized banks…
Tag: inflation
Federal Reserve Policy Has Levied a Hidden Tax On All Americans Bloomberg asks whether inflation is the legacy of the Fed: The answer is clearly YES. The dollar’s purchasing power has plummeted from 1913…
The Virtual Recovery Since mid-2009 the US has been enjoying a virtual recovery courtesy of a rigged inflation measure that understates inflation. The financial Presstitutes spoon out the government’s propaganda that prices are rising less than 2%. But anyone who purchases food, fuel, medical care or anything else knows that low inflation is no more real that Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction or Gadhafi’s alleged attacks on Libyan protesters or Iran’s nuclear weapons. Everything is a lie to serve the power-brokers. During the Clinton administration, Republican economists pushed through a change in the way the CPI is measured in order to save money by depriving Social Security retirees of their cost-of-living adjustment. Previously, the CPI measured the change in the cost of a constant standard of living. The new measure assumes that consumers adjust to price increases by lowering their standard of living by substituting lower quality, lower priced items.
The mass slaughter of millions of farm animals across the world is expected to push food prices to their highest ever levels. As well as hitting consumers’ pockets, the predicted 14% jump in food…
In a recent column, “Can The World Survive Washington’s Hubris,” I promised to examine whether the US economy will collapse before Washington in its pursuit of world hegemony brings us into military confrontation with Russia…
The world’s five largest emerging economies claim the West’s quantitative easing policy is destabilizing their own growth.Should the western cheap cash injection last too long, the developed countries themselves will suffer, experts are warning. Brazil’s…
“You cannot get the water to clear up, until you get the pigs out of the creek!” [Editor’s note: There are some informal discussions particularly on the numbers presented on the poster. The…
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…
If you have any money and you want to understand the lies that “your” government tells you with statistics, subscribe to John Williams shadowstats.com. John Williams is the best and utterly truthful statistician that we…
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.