WTF US Economy???

I ran across this chart this morning on ZeroHedge.

(Link.)

WTF is right!

If the chart above is correct, American's have truly lost their minds....

But if it's wrong, someone either made a really big mistake....or someone is intentionally lying.

What do you think?

I think we are at a stage of extreme data manipulation and finger pointing deflection from all sides no matter which side of the pond they are on.

I honestly dread to think what will ever happen if the smoke fades or the mirrors break.

Originally posted by thoughtsfull
I honestly dread to think what will ever happen if the smoke fades or the mirrors break.

Outstanding statement.

Indeed.

I too fear we are all living in fantasy land.

That chart is suspicious. The other day sentiment was reported to be the lowest since the 1980's yet consumer spending doesn't seem to have a corresponding drop. I also heard the true rate of inflation as measured 30 years ago is not being considered. I heard if the same inflation methods were used today, we would currently be in a recession instead of counting rising prices as part of increasing sales and additional consumer spending which is counted as higher GDP with today's methods of determining inflation.

The other possibility is that consumer spending is about to fall off a cliff to match the large plunge in sentiment.

reply to post by loam


Completely understandable.

You see, while consumers keep buying their products like a crack head to his smack, they are aware now (or scared for some other foolish reason) that things are not getting better and will actually get MUCH WORSE. As they lose their jobs and see their dollar devalue before their eyes, their faith in the market obviously dwindles while they continue to fight to buy the things they "need/want".

reply to post by loam


We have been living in a fantasy land of sugar coated numbers and manufactured statistics propaganda, to top the whole issue with a cherry is the way that the data has been released to appease the markets downfall recently.

Can I have whipped cream with the cherry pleaseeeeeeeeeee

reply to post by marg6043


The thing I wonder is.. how long before the lies are so obvious they can no longer hide what is happening behind lala land figures!

reply to post by thoughtsfull


If you followed the last market crash you know that the lies are already there, is not denial that Americas economy linked to the global economy is out of the woods yet, it was patched up by bandaids of bailouts that were not only to paid for the mistakes of the US too big too fail but billions were transfered to around the world to those banks linked to the US banks.

Remember that the IMF while it has the looks to be international banks, the sole higher funder of it is the US, so in other words if the IMF is buying countries and destroying them with debt is actually the US the one doing that.

The IMF is the US, even when France and Germany holds the votes. without the US it will not be IMF.

Originally posted by marg6043
reply to post by loam

 

We have been living in a fantasy land of sugar coated numbers and manufactured statistics propaganda, to top the whole issue with a cherry is the way that the data has been released to appease the markets downfall recently.

Can I have whipped cream with the cherry pleaseeeeeeeeeee

This.

The trend seems to have gone hyperbolic since '08. There is a feeling that nobody checks anything anyway so who cares, make it up...and according to game theory, who should care? If everyone accepts the rosy consensual hallucination then the emperor certainly is clothed. Until he isn't, of course.

Originally posted by thoughtsfull
reply to post by marg6043

 

The thing I wonder is.. how long before the lies are so obvious they can no longer hide what is happening behind lala land figures!

When people are carrying goods home for free from military exchanges/Walmart.....just to show "sales"

A big part of the problem is that it seems an enormous part of the population is medicated on prescription pills.

I'm not being facetious. It suddenly seems like everyone in the US is heavily sedated. Very disconcerting.

Looking at web pages to see if there was any discussion of this, I find that Australian consumers are also out of their minds in the complete OPPOSITE way...

[atsimg]http://files.abovetopsecret.com/images/member/b26a672286e0.jpg[/atsimg]

The darker line, retail sales, tracks consumer confidence reasonably well if you shift it up a bit, but more recently it seems that while consumers have quite good confidence (the Australian economy is doing quite well, globally speaking), nobody is buying anything!
pdf file

Looking at the chart further, it seems to have happened in 1997 and 2005 as well.
Anyone know what happened in those years?

reply to post by alfa1


So the reverse? Interesting.

I really would like to understand what accounts for these...

reply to post by thoughtsfull


thats when the fun starts

reply to post by loam


Probably their uber oppressive and brainwashing government. Not saying aussies really buy into their governments crap, but the graph seems to say otherwise...

This may help explain it.
How to get out of debt-funny

And there is another way the numbers can be messed with. Company A sells 10,000 units to Company B which in turns sell them to Company C which them sell them back to Company A. The items being sold never leave the warehouse that is if they are even real in the first place. And it even more fun in most cases all the companies are in fact owned by the same master company. In effect you have companies selling to them selfs. In some cases not only are the items being bought and sold not even real the companies do the buying and selling are not real. Do this a few times and you can show (at least on paper) huge retail sells numbers.
I know a man that used to work as a fork lift driver at a big warehouse up north. He once told me a story about loading boxes on a truck and the truck would just drive around the parking lot to another door to be unloaded. He told me he has both loaded and unloaded the same boxes from the same truck just from two different loading docks. He told me they (the warehouse workers) had a term for it. They called it "rotating stock" He told me that it happen at least once a week if not more and that is just the ones he knows about. He told me that he thinks that a lot of those boxes were in the warehouse for years and years only getting moved around from time to time.

I posted a link to the graph in my other thread re retail sales. Increasing retail sales is also indicative of increasing prices and given people are paying more for less, their confidence is dropping, and rightly so.

Could the jump be the sudden increase in stockpiling that happened around the time he was elected?
For instance, I know that ammo started to spike, but so did food costs and survivalist type equipment.
And wasn't this about the time that they did the cash for clunkers?
I'd really like to see a breakdown of what that WAS that Americans started spending on when they were so unconfident.

Even the MSM acknowledged that part of the boost in retails sales was the increased spending at gas stations due to increased gas prices. Clothing sales increased too but I think this coincides with return-to-school in the US and of course increase in purchases of school clothes. Remember it was only a 0.5% increase in retails sales, hardly anything to get excited about, and there's the inflation impacts as well.

This chart is just silly. I expected to see Kermit the Frog come walking onto the screen to explain how the chart explains absolutely nothing.

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