I am sure I have posted this quote couple of times already, “Statistics are like a bikini. What they reveal is suggestive, but what they conceal is vital” (Aaron Levenstein).
Every scam needs a good story. The bigger the scam the better and more intriguing the story has to be. In the last month or two we have been bombarded by expert after expert and official after official to assure us that the nation is great again and the economy is the best ever. But for some reason we cannot stand interest rate to rise and we need quantitative easing. These were supposed to be used only for economic emergencies and short whiles to get the economy back on track.
If you were not living in America you would think that Americans have dollar faucets in their homes and they just keep them running.
One of the biggest lies is the unemployment number, and the CPI is very close second. But all you have to do to know what is going on in the job market is to take a look at the labor participation rate. This tells you the percentage of Americans that are working. Mind, that if you are working 10 hours a week, you are considered working. So even that measure has some “slack” in it.
But why is the unemployment so so. Today’s (April 18th 2019) numbers came out and looky here:
“In the week ending April 13, the advance figure for seasonally adjusted initial claims was 192,000, a decrease of 5,000 from the previous week’s revised level. This is the lowest level for initial claims since September 6, 1969 when it was 182,000.”
Let me remind you with couple of things. If you have been unemployed for over 18 months (1-2 years based on state) , you do not qualify for benefits so you are not counted. So the unemployment numbers tells us how many are applying for benefit not how many have applied and total and sitting on the side line.
Also, a little bit of financial engineering, just like in third world countries it is now more beneficial for a school teacher or even college professor to work as a bartender, or for Uber, Starbucks or deliver for Amazon. We turned the country to bunch of servants. But here is the beauty of this trick. A full time employee who needs $100 a week and was working one job that paid him that now needs to work 2,3 and maybe 4 jobs to make the same money. So now this is counted as several jobs in the statistics not as one person trying to make a living.
But it gets even better, when you have a part time job or you are on 1099, you cannot claim unemployment to start with. So you could be broke enough to sell a kidney and according to the unemployment numbers, we are hitting historic lows.
The story is going to get much better, only because the reality is so scary that remote thought of it will bring this house of cards crumbling. It should have been run to the ground in 2008 but the banks were too big to fail. And if you thing they were to big to fail then, take a look at their stock prices and their caps today, they are much bigger than they were then.
So you need to know that you are the bait and they are the big fish. And they will keep telling you stories till you drop dead. You ain’t gonna see the American dream they promised you but when you are asleep. Is it time to get up?