Posted on 06/02/2014 6:52:24 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
As Thursday’s revised gross domestic product number suggests, Main Street knows much more than the Beltway economists about how bad a shape the US is in.
Despite the S&P 500 Index hitting all-time highs almost daily, Americans are voting with their feet.
The eggheads in Washington, from Treasury to the Fed, were all projecting strong growth for the first quarter of 2014 — even after the first read came out saying the “growth” was 0.025 percent, or an annualized 0.1 percent, for the quarter.
And then Thursday’s first revision showed an annualized loss of 1 percent.
Frequently, your local diner owner and your neighborhood bartender, without a college degree between them, can tell you more about the economy than Washington and Wall Street’s “bright lights.”
Unlike the pundits, they know when the orders for steak and shrimp start to give way to meatloaf and tuna salad, and when “the usual” becomes beer instead of whiskey on the rocks.
(Excerpt) Read more at nypost.com ...
You can tell everything you need to know about the economy by looking at the grandstands of a NASCAR race.
Normally, they are filled to overflowing, but these days, they are half empty.
It’s a pause.
Just before the plunge into the abyss.
Sorry to sound so negative. But the fever pitch in the stock markets and localized areas of real estate, are indicators that this nation’s economy, already enfeebled, is about to go into septic shock.
While the composite strength of the total US economy is way more than any other single player in the world, it is being threatened not by the growth of others, but by its own retreat.
But for the technology that has made natural gas widely and relatively cheaply available, the territory once known as “the United States of America” would be in far worse economic shape than it is. But as fast and as much as the technology of “fracking” has been a boost to the overall economic standing of this country, the network of strangling regulation and inept government spending programs have been shutting things down even faster.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/3151710/posts
Unemployment Drops to 0% as Last Worker Leaves Labor Force
The People’s Cube ^ | May 3, 2014 | Opiate of the People Posted by 4Liberty
Comrade Barack Obama today became the first to achieve a milestone coveted by enlightened central planners everywhere when the Bureau of Laborious Statistics announced the much-followed totally-meaningless “headline” U3 unemployment rate for last month was ZERO PERCENT! This means that the glorious economic recovery he engineered after the disastrous Bush years has now attained FULL EMPLOYMENT!
It is a tribute to Professor Obama that he was able to find the Holy Grail which eluded history’s greatest economic thinkers such as Lenin, Stalin and Mao. This landmark achievement along with his establishment of free healthcare for everyone via the Affordable Care Act cements his reputation as the Greatest Leader in this or any other universe for all time.
The dramatic moment occurred at 12:03 PM, four weeks to the day after Lyman Yilk, a pipe-fitter from Bittcling, Pa, finally gave up looking for work. Mr. Yilk has been unemployed since 2005 but was on a celebratory bender since the day after Mr. Obama’s first election and did not know that the Keystone Pipeline (which Mr. Yilk was hoping to find work on) had been cancelled due to environmental concerns. When he finally sobered up four weeks ago and learned the project was dead, he abandoned his search to find a job.
Mr. Yilk was the last worker to leave the labor force and turned the lights out as he left. According to the BLS definition:
Quote: U3: Official unemployment rate per the ILO definition occurs when people are without jobs and they have actively looked for work within the past four weeks. Without Mr. Yilk, there was no one actively looking for work any longer, hence the U3 rate was now ZERO PERCENT, praise Obama!
Gloom-and-doom naysayers were quick to note that the labor force participation rate had also dropped to zero percent which (according to them) was not a good thing as it meant no one was employed. Comrade Nancy Pelosi countered their racist, straw-man argument brilliantly by observing that it also meant no comrade was any longer “job-locked” and each was free to be an artist, writer, hooker, etc, and pursue their passion.
“There is no underestimating this tremendous achievement of Barack Obama” said Paul Klugeman, an expert on hiding declines and fudging economic statistics as well being the self-proclaimed “Conscious Liberal”. “Comrade Obama has achieved the socialist dream of freeing all of The People ™ from the slavery of work and permitting them to live off of someone else’s dime as god, if he existed, would’ve wanted.”
Dr. Klugeman was asked if a problem would arise due to the fact that since no one was working, there would also be no one to pay for the benefits that all the non-workers were collecting.
“Nonsense”, he proclaimed. “The Fed will simply print money for artists and writers and hookers to use to buy things from China! What could go wrong?”
It seems so simple now, it’s a wonder no one ever thought of it sooner.
“The genius of Dear Leader Barack Obama lies in his simplicity”, said Dr. Klugeman.
We agree.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/3151710/posts
Unemployment Drops to 0% as Last Worker Leaves Labor Force
The People’s Cube ^ | May 3, 2014 | Opiate of the People Posted by 4Liberty
Comrade Barack Obama today became the first to achieve a milestone coveted by enlightened central planners everywhere when the Bureau of Laborious Statistics announced the much-followed totally-meaningless “headline” U3 unemployment rate for last month was ZERO PERCENT! This means that the glorious economic recovery he engineered after the disastrous Bush years has now attained FULL EMPLOYMENT!
It is a tribute to Professor Obama that he was able to find the Holy Grail which eluded history’s greatest economic thinkers such as Lenin, Stalin and Mao. This landmark achievement along with his establishment of free healthcare for everyone via the Affordable Care Act cements his reputation as the Greatest Leader in this or any other universe for all time.
The dramatic moment occurred at 12:03 PM, four weeks to the day after Lyman Yilk, a pipe-fitter from Bittcling, Pa, finally gave up looking for work. Mr. Yilk has been unemployed since 2005 but was on a celebratory bender since the day after Mr. Obama’s first election and did not know that the Keystone Pipeline (which Mr. Yilk was hoping to find work on) had been cancelled due to environmental concerns. When he finally sobered up four weeks ago and learned the project was dead, he abandoned his search to find a job.
Mr. Yilk was the last worker to leave the labor force and turned the lights out as he left. According to the BLS definition:
Quote: U3: Official unemployment rate per the ILO definition occurs when people are without jobs and they have actively looked for work within the past four weeks. Without Mr. Yilk, there was no one actively looking for work any longer, hence the U3 rate was now ZERO PERCENT, praise Obama!
Gloom-and-doom naysayers were quick to note that the labor force participation rate had also dropped to zero percent which (according to them) was not a good thing as it meant no one was employed. Comrade Nancy Pelosi countered their racist, straw-man argument brilliantly by observing that it also meant no comrade was any longer “job-locked” and each was free to be an artist, writer, hooker, etc, and pursue their passion.
“There is no underestimating this tremendous achievement of Barack Obama” said Paul Klugeman, an expert on hiding declines and fudging economic statistics as well being the self-proclaimed “Conscious Liberal”. “Comrade Obama has achieved the socialist dream of freeing all of The People ™ from the slavery of work and permitting them to live off of someone else’s dime as god, if he existed, would’ve wanted.”
Dr. Klugeman was asked if a problem would arise due to the fact that since no one was working, there would also be no one to pay for the benefits that all the non-workers were collecting.
“Nonsense”, he proclaimed. “The Fed will simply print money for artists and writers and hookers to use to buy things from China! What could go wrong?”
It seems so simple now, it’s a wonder no one ever thought of it sooner.
“The genius of Dear Leader Barack Obama lies in his simplicity”, said Dr. Klugeman.
We agree.
2Q14 GDP will be >2%
We are being set up:
Step One: Show the lowest growth feasible (negative growth) for the first calendar quarter of 2014
Step Two: Inflate growth in second calendar quarter. Against the previous quarter loss, it will look very robust. It will also be the last quarter reported before the 2014 midterms
Step Three: Go back and revise the previous quarter upward, but don’t re-baseline that revision against the most recent quarter.
Step Four: Announce to the American public, “See, we’ve had continuous growth, our policies are working, blah, blah..”
Step Five: After the elections, quietly revise everything downward so you have a new baseline and use the same trick again.
Obama’s slow dance into another 1029.
Part of NASCAR’s problem is the product sucks too. The “races” are like festivals not races, the actual competition is lousy and has been for years... Add in the crappy economy and voila! you have half empty bleachers.
I’ll take “a longer trend” for $500 Alex.
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