Economy Sinking Government Knows & Giving Bad Info

"To address the China-U.S. trade imbalance requires the concerted efforts of both sides," Wu said.

Wu reiterated Chinese concerns about the roughly 50 China-related trade bills introduced this year in Congress, hinting China would likely retaliate if its interests were harmed.

"I need to be quite candid about this: If these bills are adopted, they will severely undermine U.S. business ties with China," Wu said.

Washington's trade deficit with China appears set to surpass last year's record $233 billion, according to U.S. Commerce Department figures

source: money.cnn.com...

and so forth...

reply to post by Siddhi-Data


Yep, just threats. You'll know when China does it, because it wont be a draw down of unnamed "foreign banks" - China will use it for political capital. It looks like this point any draw down is part of their normal buying/selling of US debt.

[edit on 18-12-2007 by LightinDarkness]

reply to post by Bluess


In United States economic development, the "principle of closeness" is called "sustainable development" is only one (small) part of a overall economic strategy. Stimulating the economy requires exporting products from the community to other places - whether it be widgets, or knowledge, or whatever.

reply to post by LightinDarkness


I totally agree, Exports must come to the point where it exceeds import for an economy to be healthy.

Originally posted by jackinthebox
reply to post by LightinDarkness

 

Only 520,000 of a 200+ million work force gets paid the minimum wage. -LightinDarkness

USDOL says...

1.7 million workers with wages at or below the minimum

...and that doesn't include workers who make a higher state minimum wage.

But of course we don't have to worry about the poorest people in the country who bother to work two or three jobs, because they are not the majority.




[edit on 12/18/0707 by jackinthebox]

Those who work "part time" less than 38hours a week are not counted . Only full time workers are counted. Like WalMart if you work 38 hours a week then you are considered part time help .

Our Government is just printing more money and throwing into circulation hoping it will keep the the sheeple from realizing the truth that the US Dollar is standing on the edge of a crumbling foundation ready to collapse.

My daughter worked as a waitress at Pizza Hut and she only made $3.65hr.
as your tips are supposed to make up the difference to be able to get minimum wage.

Go to rense.com and do some reading on the consumer price index, the climbing infation rates have made food prices go up .08% in the last month and clothing has jumped 2%.

The Government only gives info that it thinks you should hear or would like to hear. A whole lot of disinfo being put out to the people.
In the past week Coffee has jumped from 7.79 a can to 10.99 a can for the same brand , I know becuase I price shop and try to get every thing I can for what I have to spend.

Grrr is I missed out on alot of action on the thread so Im going to try and address each thing here. First off oil. Oil prices are risen and lowed by speculators. Now thats fine but there are alot of unregulated exchanges ICE for example is one. Now oil has remained steady with inflation......LOL....I'm not sure how anyone can say that. The price of oil has doubled in the past year. Why because these speculators are going in and driving up the market. They use excuses like hurricanes. Like this year there were threats of hurricanes so they used that as an excuse to drive up the prices of oil but when they never came do u think the prices went down? Not at all. Thats just one of many examples but I dont want to spend to much time on this because next I want to go into minimum wage.

Im not sure if I understood a previous poster but yes minimum wage does drive inflation. But I dont think that gives an excuse to never raise it. Once again I go back to everything else is already going up. Have you been to a store and see what a gallon of milk costs. $4.99 here in Florida where I am. Thats one hours worth of work for your typical minimum wage person. Now I will say that most places do not pay minimum wage Im very well aware of this but even $7.20 which is where they want to raise it too. Its still way behind the curve. Thats $288.00 a week. Take that times 4 thats $1152.00 a month. That is what I pay in health insurance a month. How can people survive. Now we are in a capitalist society and I understand competition and mabey these guys put themselves in this position but that doesnt mean we leave the working class out of the loop.

Another person says the government cant manipulate the data. Ok well you keep believing that but let me throw this at you. Jobs numbers that come out always gets reconfigured from the previous month. Example when the jobs reports came out in august it showed we had a job loss of 20,000 jobs which gave the fed the room to cut 50 basis points. When next months numbers came out it was revised to actually a gain of like 80,000 or something to that effect dont hold me to the numbers exactly because Im going on memory and frankly dont have the initiative to look it up. The government can do whatever they want and Im quite shocked that an ATS member would come out and say trust the government all their numbers are par.

Anyways this thread was started not to have arguments on weather or not this was started to let people know just be prepared and dont trust the government trust yourself.

Outsourcing has been going on en masse since the early 1990's. Is there any evidence to show that this somehow creates a huge impact on the economy now? I do not find any evidence for that. While when a company outsources it does leave people out of jobs, government routinely steps in and retrains people to be able to get jobs in a knowledge economy. I am not sure that shifting away from industrial complexes and into the knowledge economy is BAD thing - seems to be a good thing, as the knowledge economy offers more jobs and better quality jobs for those who are willing to be retrained.

Well it hasnt done anything to our job market per se for 2 reasons one because countries like Japan build auto plants here and give american people jobs and reason 2 and thank goodness most of the jobs out there come from small businesses and not from big corporations (who does all of the outsourcing) But when things start to happen like what is going on now the will cease to hire and even lay off. When small biz starts hurting be ready because the big companies will not be there to save us. These 2 reasons aside it also puts us in a really crappy position look how we have to kiss chinas arse because they do a lot of our manufacturing. I mean lets put it this way. I have a customer who makes military uniforms for our government who lost a job to chinese manufacturers I mean cmon a nation that cant manufacture on its own cant stand on its own.

Originally posted by cloakndagger
The elephant in the room is the baby boomer's retiring and the first social security check went out this year. As far as we know the government has been eating up the social security for other things. Remember Al Gores Lock box?

First Baby Boomer to receive social security. The wave has just started.

www.ssa.gov...


P.S. 2008 an estimated 8 million homes will go into sub prime which means their monthly rates will go up.

Yeah not only that these people will start to pull their money out of the market via 401k and money markets so they can have money when they retire. The social security is a huge problem.

reply to post by mybigunit


I'm sorry but I've spent too much time in economic development to know this is factually inaccurate. There has been a net loss in manufacturing jobs since really the 1980s. While a few plants have moved here from overseas, those plants are few and far between and governments offer hundreds of millions in incentive packages to lure them. When outsourcing occurs, in most cases the government or a non-profit steps in to offer job retraining for knowledge economy industry. This does not always happen, but I have also failed to find a case of outsourcing where there is not at least one job retraining program in the area available to participants (they just may have to apply for it, which could take a week or two). Outsourcing will continue until the labor markets overseas become more expensive than US labor markets. Due to unions, this is unlikely to happen in my life time.

The decline of the industrial complex has had only significant impacts on the economies where the outsourcing occurs, and then usually only for a few years before recovery starts. All research supports the idea that large scale manufacturing and industrial recruitment is detrimental over the long-term to any economy. Governments should be diversifying their employer base and finding alternatives to large scale manufacturing in their economic development plans. Most are, although a few unwisely spend hundreds of millions to lure a honda factory or two.

reply to post by mybigunit


If adjusted numbers is your basis for the claim that the government is making up statistics, then I believe you do not understand what they mean. Economic indicators lag. It is impossible to get all the information about job loss/gain for one month within one month, for obvious logistical reasons. Statistics are adjusted when the government receives additional data which requires an adjustment in the numbers. They are not making it up, the data sources lag naturally.

I also do not know what to tell you if you do not know that gas prices have finally reached their inflation adjusted norm. Gas prices were artificially manipulated and depressed from 1990-2000 which means gas prices did not rise with inflation. In 2000 and 2001, the price manipulation stopped for a variety of reasons and gas shot up like a rocket because it had a lot of room to go before it reached inflation adjusted norms. It has reached that. Again, most of this "OMG GAS IS SO HIGH!" is due to federal and state taxes, which have been added to. The price of GAS - NOT the taxes - is quite inflation adjusted at this time.

An historical look at the CPI shows food and clothing prices are spiking like they do EVERY YEAR around this time for obvious reasons. The "spike" is not dramatic, and is not enough to throw people in poverty - unless they are literally refusing to perhaps buy the generic name brand food over the name brand food.

The minimum wage in my opinion is not a cure to poverty. All the minimum wage does, when raised, is collectively raise the price of goods for everyone. Everyone suffers, and the few that benefit are immediately slammed with the reality that now their costs too have increased. This is what happens when you force business to pay people a certain amount - they will be paid much less than they would be if no minimum was in place. People can and do survive on the minimum wage by ensuring it is not their permanent pay rate. They get other jobs, move up in their current job, or go to school while working.

Light...Im very well aware that the numbers that come out or lagging indicators what Im saying is how can there be such a huge difference. But lets set that aside lets talk about the job numbers....answer me this do you understand how they come up with the numbers? You think they call every household out there ask people if they are employed or not? No this isnt how it works otherwise the employment numbers we be like we added 138,341 new jobs. But the numbers are not like that are they they come out 138,000 new jobs. Im not going to go into great detail how they do it but you can do research on the bureau of labor statistics for more info but to give you a basic gist on how they do it they do sample surveys that change every month. This is how they say that they do it. These numbers are never I repeat these numbers are never accurate. They are basically guestimates. The only way I would trust the governments numbers is if they called every household and asked. As long as they do guestimates Im sorry I just cant put my livelyhood at stake on that.

Now I will say this and Ive said it several times in this thread the job market as of now it strong and it is the only thing right now not sending us to depression. I think we are sitting in recession now. I dont believe we are at 4.7% what the government says we are I dont believe that for a minute i think we are around 5% but once the job market starts to tumble where are we gonna pick up the slack?

See I think this recession has been due for awhile because of all of the reasons i mentioned at the start but there is one thing that kept this thing going and that is real estate. All the working class people pulled money from their houses which gave them spending money and that did what most of us working class people do...when we get money we spend it. Thats what kept us afloat. Now giving the current situation the only thing that I can see saving us is our exporting due to the weak dollar. I just dont feel that is going to work. Oh and Ive been making a killing shorting stocks so I dont think it is just me that feels like the economy is in the crapper. Oh and for all of those people that say well the US economy dont matter anymore we have China and India....Let me tell you something when the US coughs the world gets the flu is the old term used and its still a fact sorry..... Last but not least this thread was to tell people to prepare. Set a little money aside..even though your dollar isnt worth as much buy that canned food and just be ready. I dont rule out we will stave off a depression but you know what its better to be prepared for the worst and hope for the best.

reply to post by LightinDarkness

'We are told daily that the Gross Domestic Product in America is up, our economy is moving forward and we are doing so well. But why, when Americans are working longer and harder just to keep up, why are we told that things are so good, that the GDP is a measure of enormous progress?

The gross domestic product adds up everything Americans spend and declares that as the total good. As a result, the hundreds of billions of dollars that Americans spend to cope with crime, the lawyers, and social breakdown costs, is all GDP – car crashes, fender benders in front of the Capitol. Mr. President, two hundred billion dollars a year in repair bills and hospital bills give this country a real boost.”
Speech on floor of U.S. Senate by Senator Bryon Dorgan (D-ND),
October 17, 1995

Now Im not into quoting democrats (no offense to all the dems out there) but this guy has it right. The way we judge GDP is not good and does not give accurate numbers at all. The way we get all of our economic numbers are flawed and I just read about the post about where was the decline that was supposed to happen. It has been happening it just hasnt been halfway acknowledged until August but just wait 2008 is going to be a doozy.

reply to post by mybigunit


That shows a fundamental misunderstanding of survey methodology. It is unnecessary and impossible to poll every single business to ask them about their net job loss. As long as a random sample is done on the business population that contains enough to ensure a 95% confidence level and a 3% confidence interval, we can be sure that the survey represents the business population. This is simply survey methodology and is true regardless of subject matter. There are few things in academia that are facts, but survey methodology is one of them. You can and the government does make accurate projections using statistically sound survey methods. Adjustments are done because it is impossible to determine net job loss until the month is over - even if I asked you on the last day of each month, you may not respond that day or you may have outstanding job offers that are later accepted, or pending terminations.

I do not see any reason or rationale as to why the government would "make up" numbers, and in my opinion you have not provided evidence as to why they do or as to why your "feelings" about what the numbers really are, are correct. I also feel you have not provided any evidence about why we are entering into a depression. I would agree most economic data shows a slight recession, but recessions are part of a cyclical economy and are to be expected. Entering a DEPRESSION requires some catastrophic external event that would bring the economy to its knees - like the stock market crashing completely as it did before our last depression (by crashing, I mean losing 75% of more of its value in one day). I see no evidence of any future event like that, although I suppose a random act of god could cause one at any time.

However it is your opinion, and you are of course entitled to it. And I disagree with it, which I am entitled to do.

reply to post by mybigunit


That is clearly a political statement that provides no evidence. You notice he does not provide any information about how "Americans are working harder and longer just to keep up." This is simply a political statement that reflects the class warfare ideology of the politician.

The GDP is indeed one of many good indicators for economic success. When people choose to spend more above and beyond inflation and cost of living, they either have more money or are able to get more loans based on excessive credit. Its one side of the picture only, but it is an important side.

reply to post by mybigunit


I do agree with much of what that Senator says, even though he is a Dem

If you want to see an even better approach to the entire financial system, read up or watch some of Dr. Paul's speeches. Only man in the government who tells it as it is.

reply to post by Nailer



There are also plenty of people who work more than 38 or even 40 hours per week, but are still titled part-time help by the company to avoid providing benefits. But of course these "part-timers" are eager to pick up whatever hours they can.

As far as government manipulation of numbers goes, consider this. People who's unemployment benefits have expired are no longer considered unemployed wether or not they have actually returned to work. There is no accurate way to determine the number of homeless in the U.S., conveniently enough for those in charge, so there is really no way to determine the trends of actual unemployment.

reply to post by LightinDarkness


Do some research on what caused the first depression here is one link i recommend no just using this but en.wikipedia.org...

Then do some research on recessions en.wikipedia.org...

I think we are sitting in a recession as we speak there is to much negative things out there not to be. Now you talk about lagging indicators but the thing about recessions is you dont know your in one till your 3 to 6 months into one because you have to wait for the government data (which I think will show things are fine and dandy)until there is a point to where this is no denying the downturn. You say you dont see the rational on why the government wouldnt do it but yet u kinda summed it up. They dont want to see panic and massive selling and people pulling money from banks or brokerage accounts....that to me would be a very good reason to cover it up. The sad thing is the people with smart money pulls there money out long before the peons do. I havent pulled my money yet because I dont feel we are in depression but trust me when we get near Ill be one of the first ones out. We will have to agree to disagree on this you are right but it is just beyond me why you think the government wouldnt push the pencil a little to stave off mass panic and mass selling. Also how bout them auto sales!!!

Oh and I think the real test will be holiday sales. If they come in short get ready for the sales event of the year cause everyone will be selling. And I like Ron Paul but I like Huckabee's idea of getting rid of the IRS. A consumption tax to me is the most intelligent way of fixing alot of monetary system problems...like people saving money and making sure that everyone pays their fare share of taxes. Ron's Idea of having multiple currency some backed by gold was interesting also. If those 2 ran on the same ticket P/VP they would get my vote!!!!!

reply to post by mybigunit


Please, if you are going to tell me do research whatever you do don't then cite wikipedia articles. It only makes your perspective look even less legitimate.

Read the following peer reviewed academic articles:

On the Great Depression:
Calomiris, C.W. & J.R. Mason. (1997). Contagion and Bank Failures During the Great Depression: The June 1932 Chicago Banking Panic. The American Economic Review, 87(5): 863-883.

On US Recession Forecasting:
Hamilton, J.D. (1989). A New Approach to the Economic Analysis of Nonstationary Time Series and the Business Cycle. Econometrica, 57(2): 357-384.

You can of course say that we are sitting in a recession, but what proof do you have? You cant rely on government numbers because you claim they are all made up. How exactly is it you can tell when we are in a economic recession without data? There are numerous quantitative tools used to predict recessions with great accuracy, and those tools have thus far pointed toward an oncoming minor recession in lock step with past economic cycles.

You still have not shown how the government is making up numbers, nor provided justification for doing so. If the government wanted to stop panic why did they allow the depression to happen by publishing "real" numbers? Why has the government continued to post numbers that are not completely positive? After all, what good is stopping panic with fake numbers when once everyone finds out you cause a complete economic collapse? How is the government keeping all of this under wraps, doing something not in its best long term taxing interest, while keeping tens of thousands of government employees shut up?

Many investors are simply emotional and let their emotions dictate what they do, so they sell low and buy high. As the Baron Rothschild has said, "buy when there is blood in the street." The "smart money" loves recessions as the average investor panics and sells as all the stocks go on sale at fire sale prices.