Guided By Nonsense
“Read the directions and directly you will be directed in the right direction.” — Lewis Carroll
U.S. consumers are at it again. After a seven year hiatus they’re once again doing what they do best. They’re buying stuff.
According to the Commerce Department, personal consumption expenditures (PCE), which is the primary measure of consumer spending on goods and services in the U.S. economy, increased $119.2 billion in April. That marks an increase of 1 percent, and is the biggest one month increase since August 2009…nearly seven years ago. Indeed, this is quite an achievement.
The consumer, you know, is the primary engine of U.S. economic growth. Without consumption GDP doesn’t go up; rather, it goes down. Moreover, in a debt based money system, when GDP goes down the whole financial debt structure breaks down.
We don’t condone it. Certainly we’d prefer an honest hard money system where savings and investment drives growth as opposed to borrowing and spending. But our preference has no bearing on reality in this matter.
Still, given the vast array of pretense inherent to a debt based money system, when we hear that PCEs increased by the largest margin in nearly seven years, we take a keen interest. Naturally, we want to know what’s going on. Namely, we ask, where’s the money coming from?
Where’s the Money Coming From?
Middle class incomes, the last we recall, scored a big fat rotten goose egg over the last decade. By this we mean incomes haven’t gone up. To the contrary, they’ve going down.
Our understanding of this unfortunate situation isn’t based on anecdotes we overheard at the corner donut shop. Nor is it based on experiences shared by the crusty fellows casting their lines off Belmont Veterans Memorial Pier. Instead, we have hard evidence and solid proof. Specifically, we point to the distilled findings of Pew Research released earlier this month.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
