International Forecaster Weekly

Faked Numbers Hides The Economic Reality for Most Of Us

EVERYTHING they tell you is a lie. Not just the bogus numbers out of the Labor department, but virtually all the economic data you get has been altered, doctored and tarted up to the point its own mother wouldn’t recognize it.

Bob Rinear | November 20, 2013

On Monday, John Crudele of the New York Post caused a stir with an article declaring that the reason the unemployment numbers heading into the 2012 re-election run of Barack Obama were falling was because they were faked. The idea being that Obama needed something concrete to point to concerning the economy, and the labor department allowed “some” amount of their people to simply make up data to help his cause.

If you remember, heading into the 2012 election cycle, the economy was still barely limping by. We hadn’t had our insane DOW run past 14, 000 and 15,000. Unemployment was still rampant. Participation in the labor force was still falling off. Layoffs were still headline news. Food stamp use was rising dramatically. Obama needed “something” he could point to as an accomplishment and the jobs number would certainly help his cause.

So now a whistle blower working for the labor people, has come out to say that yes indeed, he and others he knew faked the reports he was filing, and he did it on orders from “above”. The implication being that folks higher up the food chain in the labor Department were complicit in helping Obama fudge the jobs report, which by most measures is one of the most important reports we get each month.

The main stream media picked up the story and it got some air time Tuesday morning. There was the usual back and forth bantering about what it means, if there was a scandal, etc etc. But for me the part I found most entertaining was simply this….when those numbers hit, we actually wrote about them that week and said flat out that they were as fake as a NY hookers smile. We screamed as loud as digital print can sound off, that indeed they “fixed” those jobs numbers to make Obama look like he’d actually done something good.

But unfortunately, my amusement over Crudele coming up with a whistleblower concerning this “old news” didn’t last long. Why? Because the sad fact is… and we talk about it constantly… that EVERYTHING they tell you is a lie. Not just the bogus numbers out of the Labor department, but virtually all the economic data you get has been altered, doctored and tarted up to the point its own mother wouldn’t recognize it. In fact, with timing that was almost heavenly inspired, late on the same day as the article, Carl Ichan caused a market sell off by saying that almost all the stock market earnings reports were “a mirage” (a great word for fake).

We often mention the fakery in which the labor department changes the definition of unemployed, so that they can hide millions of them under a category of “not in the labor pool”. We’ve also shown you how they bolster the unemployment numbers using the BLS’s “Birth/death” model to add jobs to the readings that don’t exist. We’ve shown you all how that if you simply measured unemployment via the same means we used in the 80’s it would be running over 16% instead of the baloney 7.2% they tell us. But again that’s simply the jobs numbers. ALL the data is corrupted, and the biggest dog of them all is the CPI numbers.

The Government had been trying to hide inflation from us like a mom hides candy from her 4 year old. If something is going up wildly like the price of food or energy, they simply don’t include it in the readings. They say those areas are “too volatile” to be included in the measure. Hey, I don’t know about your family but in mine we need food and energy. It’s “included” in my budget for sure. But just leaving out certain sectors that don’t fit their “under 2% annual inflation” is just a fraction of the games they play. Then there’s the substitution game. In the Governments game of “hide the baloney”, if something that they measure is getting too price heavy, they switch away from it. In their words, if steak is going up too far and too fast, consumers will switch to hamburgers. Since burgers are considerably less expensive than steak, then the inflation rate has actually fallen. HUH??

So, the substitution factor allows for wild price appreciations to take place, and they don’t have to include them in their final reading. Nope, just swap to something that hasn’t run as far. But oh wait…there’s more. Then when they couldn’t contain inflation with substitution they came up with the hedonic readings. This is like lucasion mathematics on acid. The idea here is that even if something costs more, but because it is technologically more advanced than it used to be and “could” help you produce more…then it actually can be recorded as costing less. Is that how you see the price of things? Of course not. If a Chevy “car” cost 18,000 last year, and is 18,720 this year, you don’t tell yourself it is actually cheaper because it has a better stereo system than last years. You simply say “it went up”. Why? Because it really did. But not according to the Government wonks. That car DECREASED the CPI. Go figure.

They fudge the jobs numbers. They fudge the inflation numbers. They fudge virtually every number they shovel at you week after week and month after month. Fraud and manipulation is what Wall Street and Government stand for now. How about “mark to model?” How’s that for a prime beef example of outright lying? 90% of the so called assets held at banks are mark to model, not mark to market. Are you aware of this? Trust me, MOST aren’t.

Because of the fact that if banks were made to report their holdings on a mark to market basis they’d all be found to be insolvent, the FASB at the URGING of our Congress allowed banks to mark their “assets” to model. For those of you who don’t understand what that means, it is quite simple. Suppose a bank repo’s a house that they gave a 700K dollar mortgage to, but because the housing bubble burst, the house is now only worth 425K. Well, they don’t have to carry that 300K dollar loss on their books! Nope, they can “mark” the asset to what they “thought” it was worth, or the “model”. They don’t have to mark the value to its real selling price in today’s market. How’s that for some fine upstanding accounting?

I wish it was ONLY just Obama rigging the jobs numbers, but unfortunately that is just one in a very long string of lies, twists and games that are fostered on us daily. The jobs report, the CPI, the mark to model, the Gold and Silver manipulation, the MF Global fraud, the Cyprus “bail in”, the productivity reports, the wages reports and on and on and on…are all simply made up. Lies. Distortions. That is exactly why you read this publication, to get some real facts for a change instead of the pabulum they spew in the main stream media.

It’s good that the NY Post decided to run that article. Maybe it will wake up a few delirious persons to what really happens out there. But, don’t get your hopes up..the masses seem quite happy being lied to.

(Link to John Crudele's article in the NY Post)