...like the bogus employment reports, they twist the numbers and tart them up so much their own mother wouldn’t recognize them.
If you’re like most folks, you don’t enjoy being lied to. But unfortunately, we as the collective Citizens of the US are lied to every day, by multiple outlets.
It’s not just the bought and paid for Main Stream Media, it’s not just the politicians, it’s not just the Federal Reserve, it’s not just the World bank or IMF, it’s all of them and more. Every day.
Fake news dominates the airwaves. They’ll tell you any manner of crap that they’ve been instructed to say. It doesn’t matter if it’s real or not as long as it elicits the type of emotional response they want. As long as it furthers some specific agenda.
Being that we tend to follow the markets, we are subject to a brutal onslaught of horrific lies. But what people don’t realize is that the economic lies we’re told have really dire consequences for people. For instance if you’re making economic decisions about what to do with your money, your job, your family, etc, it’s terrible if you make bad decisions because you believed what you heard on Financial TV.
Probably the most egregious liars of all are our vaunted Federal Reserve hacks. For instance, Alan Greenspan was a gold bug in his early years. "Deficit spending is simply a scheme for the confiscation of wealth. Gold stands in the way of this insidious process.” – he wrote in 1966.
But when he became the Chairman of the Fed, he flipped his tune and called gold a relic, with little monetary or investment value. Then not surprisingly when he was out as Fed head, he became a gold bug again, advocating for a return the gold standard.
Of course he was “trumped” (pardon the pun) by Ben Bernanke who lied to us about virtually everything. His crowning achievement in liardom was when asked who got the 16 trillion we sent to Europe, his response was “I don’t know.”
And then we had to deal with years of Janet yellen, spinning her own version of Mayberry RFD, as she lied about everything from employment to inflation, to Corporate profits.
Now it’s Powell’s turn. He’s telling us the trillions he’s pumping into the system is “Not QE!” and if you took the most technical literal translation of QE, it is true that it is not “identical” to prior QE programs. But let’s not kid ourselves “not QE” is full blown QE.
All that said, there are TWO things that every Fed administration in history has lied to us about consistently. That is employment and inflation.
Magicians appear to do things that are impossible. But no matter how stunned and agog you are at seeing them make something disappear, or putting a steel rod through their head, you know in your heart you’re being deceived. That can’t be real. You’re right, it’s not.
With the Fed’s their “magic” usually comes in the form of changing the rules. If real unemployment is running too high, you simply change the description of “employed” and “boom!” The unemployment rate drops.
They’ve changed the rules about how employment is calculated several times since the 1980’s. The report we get handed every month is the U3 report and it’s coming in , in the 3.5% range. Of course stripped out are disillusioned folks, long term discouraged folks, etc. Even the U6 reading which is their broadest reading is in the 7% range. That still doesn’t encompass counting everyone as we did in the past. If we were measuring unemployment the way we did from the 60’s until mid 80’s our “official” unemployment wouldn’t be in the 3% category, we’d be at 18%+. Yes that’s right, 18% plus.
Now, my favorite pet peeve when being lied to by the Cretans is the inflation rate. Every month we have to listen to any one of many Fed hucksters telling us how we’re far short of their 2% inflation goals and they’re going to keep cranking things until they hit it.
I try not to get vulgar in the letters, but this is unmitigated bullshit. Anyone that’s not in Government circles knows that inflation has been eating us away for 20+ years. And like the bogus employment reports, they twist the numbers and tart them up so much their own mother wouldn’t recognize them.
While the Feds bitch add moan that they can’t get us to 2% inflation, if we simply measured inflation the way we did in 1980, it would show us running at 6% annually. But wait it gets better. If we used the methodology we used in 1980, the rate would literally be 10%. And guess what? It would be correct.
“But Bob, that can’t be!” people tell me. But alas, it is indeed true. You owe it to yourself to go check out the Chapwood index. Really you need to do this.
Ed Butowski and his team at Chapwood Investments finally got tired of people losing ground each year because inflation is eating them up. So this is what he decided to do:
The government’s baseline CPI measure excludes items such as taxes, energy, and food. It is clearly manipulated and biased, therefore it is rarely accurate. In creating the Chapwood Index we collected over 4,000 items from friends and associates around the country of items they spend money on in the daily course of their lives. We then narrowed the list down to the top 500 items that were used most frequently. We then track and monitor the price increase of these 500 items without any manipulation and biases. This is important to underscore. We take the precise price for the same item quarter by quarter and calculate the increase or decrease. We tracked the prices on a quarterly basis and created a weighted index based on price.
He used common every day things. Home repairs, tolls, movie tickets, detergent, light bulbs, tires, dog food, paper towels, can of soup, etc. 500 common items.
And what did their team find? From 2015 until now, for the most part REAL inflation has been running about 8.5 to 13% in each of the 50 largest cities in America. 8-13 folks. Not “under 2%” as the lying Fed’s tell us every year.
This is exactly why the middle class is getting squeezed out of existence. If your wages are stagnant, hell even if they rise 2% a year, you’re still behind the eight ball by 6 to 11% a year. Eventually, you are not able to keep and maintain your standard of living.
I want you all to go there and check it out. Chapwoodindex.com and see for yourself that what you’ve suspected is absolutely true. Then the next time Powell and his band of unelected elitist pompous asses tell you that “inflation has fallen short of our targets” silently scream in your head “you lying sack of dung!” because now you know that in reality… he gets paid to lie to you.
How terribly sad.