{"id":127497,"date":"2014-07-02T16:47:12","date_gmt":"2014-07-02T16:47:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/?p=127497"},"modified":"2014-07-02T16:47:12","modified_gmt":"2014-07-02T16:47:12","slug":"stone-cold-proof-government-economic-numbers-highly-manipulated","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/money\/stone-cold-proof-government-economic-numbers-highly-manipulated\/","title":{"rendered":"Stone Cold Proof That Government Economic Numbers Are Being Highly Manipulated"},"content":{"rendered":"

Michael T. Snyder\u00a0<\/em>
\nRINF Alternative News<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

How in the world does the government expect us to trust the economic numbers that they give us anymore? For a long time, many have suspected that they were being manipulated, and as you will see below we now have stone cold proof that this is indeed the case. But first, let\u2019s talk about the revised GDP number for the first quarter of 2014 that was just released. Initially, they told us that the U.S. economy only shrank by 0.1 percent in Q1. Then that was revised down to a 1.0 percent contraction, and now we are being informed that the economy actually contracted\u00a0by a whopping 2.9 percent<\/span><\/strong><\/a>\u00a0during the first quarter. So what are we actually supposed to believe? Sometimes I almost get the feeling that government bureaucrats are just throwing darts at a dartboard in order to get these numbers. Of course that is not actually true, but how do we know that we can actually trust the numbers that they give to us?<\/p>\n

Over at shadowstats.com, John Williams publishes alternative economic statistics that he believes are much more realistic than the government numbers. According to his figures, the U.S. economy has actually been\u00a0continually contracting since 2005<\/span><\/strong><\/a>. That would mean that we have been in a recession for the last nine years.<\/p>\n

Could it be possible that he is right and the bureaucrats in Washington D.C. are wrong?<\/p>\n

Before you answer that question, read the rest of this article.<\/p>\n

It just might change your thinking a bit.<\/p>\n

Another number that many have accused of being highly manipulated is the inflation rate.<\/p>\n

But we don\u2019t have to sit around and wonder if that figure is being manipulated. The truth is that\u00a0even those that work inside the Federal Reserve<\/strong>\u00a0admit that it is being manipulated.<\/p>\n

As Robert Wenzel\u00a0recently pointed out<\/span><\/strong><\/a>, Mike Bryan, a vice president and senior economist in the Atlanta Fed\u2019s research department,\u00a0has been very open about the fact<\/span><\/strong><\/a>\u00a0that the way inflation is calculated has been changed almost every month at times\u2026<\/p>\n

The\u00a0Economist<\/em>\u00a0retells a conversation<\/span><\/strong><\/a>\u00a0with Stephen Roach, who in the 1970s worked for the Federal Reserve under Chairman Arthur Burns. Roach remembers that when oil prices surged around 1973, Burns asked Federal Reserve Board economists to strip those prices out of the CPI \u201cto get a less distorted measure.\u00a0When food prices then rose sharply, they stripped those out too\u2013followed by used cars, children\u2019s toys, jewellery, housing and so on, until around half of the CPI basket was excluded<\/strong>\u00a0because it was supposedly \u2018distorted\u2019\u201d by forces outside the control of the central bank. The story goes on to say that, at least in part because of these actions, the Fed failed to spot the breadth of the inflationary threat of the 1970s.<\/p>\n

I have a similar story. I remember a morning in 1991 at a meeting of the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland\u2019s board of directors. I was welcomed to the lectern with, \u201cNow it\u2019s time to see what Mike is going to throw out of the CPI this month.<\/strong>\u201d It was an uncomfortable moment for me that had a lasting influence. It was my motivation for constructing the Cleveland Fed\u2019s median CPI.<\/p>\n

I am a reasonably skilled reader of a monthly CPI release. And since I approached each monthly report with a pretty clear idea of what the actual rate of inflation was, it was always pretty easy for me to look across the items in the CPI market basket and identify any offending\u2013or \u201cdistorted\u201d\u2013price change. Stripping these items from the price statistic revealed the truth\u2013and confirmed that I was right all along about the actual rate of inflation.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Right now, the Federal Reserve tells us that the inflation rate is sitting at about 2 percent.<\/p>\n

But according to John Williams, if the inflation rate was calculated the same way that it was in 1990 it would be\u00a0nearly 6 percent<\/span><\/strong><\/a>.<\/p>\n

And if the inflation rate was calculated the same way that it was in 1980 it would be\u00a0nearly 10 percent<\/span><\/strong><\/a>.<\/p>\n

So which number are we supposed to believe?<\/p>\n

The one that makes us feel the best?<\/p>\n

And without a doubt, \u201c2 percent inflation\u201d sounds a whole lot better than \u201c10 percent inflation\u201d does.<\/p>\n

But anyone that does any grocery shopping knows that we are definitely not in a low inflation environment. For much more on this, please see my previous article entitled \u201cInflation? Only If You Look At Food, Water, Gas, Electricity And Everything Else<\/span><\/strong><\/a>\u201c.<\/p>\n

Of course the unemployment rate is being manipulated as well. Just consider the following excerpt from a recent\u00a0New York Post article<\/span><\/strong><\/a>\u2026<\/p>\n

In case you are just joining this ongoing drama, the Labor Department pays Census to conduct the monthly Household Survey that produces the national unemployment rate, which despite numerous failings is \u2013 inexplicably \u2013 still very important to the Federal Reserve and others.<\/p>\n

One of the problems with the report is that Census field representatives \u2013 the folks who knock on doors to conduct the surveys \u2013 and their supervisors have, according to my sources, been shortcutting the interview process.<\/p>\n

Rather than collect fresh data each month as they are supposed to do, Census workers\u00a0have been filling in the blanks with past months\u2019 data<\/strong>. This helps them meet the strict quota of successful interviews set by Labor.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s just one of the ways the surveys are falsified.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The Federal Reserve would have us believe that the unemployment rate in the U.S. has fallen from a peak of 10.0 percent during the recession all the way down to 6.3 percent now.<\/p>\n

But according\u00a0to shadowstats.com<\/span><\/strong><\/a>, the broadest measure of unemployment is well over 20 percent and has kept rising since the end of the last recession.<\/p>\n

And according to the Federal Reserve\u2019s own numbers, the percentage of working age Americans with a job has barely increased over the past four years\u2026<\/p>\n

\"Employment-Population-Ratio-2014-425x282\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The chart above looks like a long-term employment decline to me.<\/p>\n

But that is not the story that the government bureaucrats are selling to us.<\/p>\n

So where does the truth lie?<\/p>\n

What numbers are we actually supposed to believe?<\/p>\n

Michael T. Snyder<\/strong>\u00a0is a graduate of the McIntire School of Commerce at the University of Virginia and has a law degree and an LLM from the University of Florida Law School. He is an attorney that has worked for some of the largest and most prominent law firms in Washington D.C. and who now spends his time researching and writing and trying to wake the American people up. You can follow his work on\u00a0The Economic Collapse blog<\/a>,\u00a0End of the American Dream\u00a0<\/a>and\u00a0The Truth Wins<\/a>. His new novel entitled \u201cThe Beginning Of The End<\/a>\u201d is now available on\u00a0Amazon.com<\/a>.<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Michael T. Snyder\u00a0 RINF Alternative News How in the world does the government expect us to trust the economic numbers that they give us anymore? For a long time, many have suspected that they were being manipulated, and as you will see below we now have stone cold proof that this is indeed the case. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[487,52],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-127497","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-breaking-news","7":"category-money"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/127497","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=127497"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/127497\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=127497"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=127497"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=127497"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}