Home » Posts tagged 'john williams' (Page 2)
Tag Archives: john williams
Inaccurate statistics and the threat to bonds
Inaccurate statistics and the threat to bonds
Statistics have become very misleading: in particular we are being badly misled into believing that the US is teetering on the edge of price deflation, because the US official rate of inflation is barely positive, a level that US bonds and therefore all other financial markets have priced in without accepting it is actually significantly higher.
There are two possible approaches to assessing the true rate of price inflation. You can either reverse all the tweaks government statisticians have implemented over the decades to reduce the apparent rate, or you can collect a statistically significant sample of price data independently and turn that into an index. John Williams of Shadowstats.com is well known for his work on the former approach, but until recently I was unaware that anyone was attempting the latter. That is until Simon Hunt of Simon Hunt Strategic Services drew my attention to the Chapwood Index, which deserves wider publicity.
This is from the website: “The Chapwood Index reflects the true cost-of-living increase in America. Updated and released twice a year, it reports the unadjusted actual cost and price fluctuation of the top 500 items on which Americans spend their after-tax dollars in the 50 largest cities in the nation.” It is, therefore, statistically significant, and it consistently shows price inflation to be much higher than that indicated by the Consumer Price Index (CPI).
The table below shows this difference since 2011, and how it affects real GDP.
Sources: Chapwood Index, US Bureau of Labor Statistics and Bureau of Economic Analysis. Figures may not total due to rounding.
The Chapwood number in the table is the simple arithmetic average of the 50 cities. The year-in, year-out 10% inflation rate is notable. Furthermore, Chapwood shows cumulative inflation rate as shown by the CPI for the four years to be understated by 39.9%, and using Chapwood numbers in place of the GDP deflator, real GDP has slumped a cumulative total of 21.4% over the four years.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
16 Signs That The Economy Has Stalled Out And The Next Economic Downturn Is Here
16 Signs That The Economy Has Stalled Out And The Next Economic Downturn Is Here
If U.S. economic growth falls any lower, we are officially going to be in recession territory. On Wednesday, we learned that U.S. GDP grew at a 0.2 percent annual rate in the first quarter of 2015. That was much lower than all of the “experts” were projecting. And of course there are all sorts of questions whether the GDP numbers the government feeds us are legitimate anyway. According to John Williams of shadowstats.com, if honest numbers were used they would show that U.S. GDP growth has been continuously negative since 2005. But even if we consider the number that the government has given us to be the “real” number, it still shows that the U.S. economy has stalled out. It is almost as if we have hit a “turning point”, and there are many out there (including myself) that believe that the next major economic downturn is dead ahead. As you will see in this article, a whole bunch of things are happening right now that we would expect to see if a recession was beginning. The following are 16 signs that the economy has stalled out and the next economic downturn is here…
#1 We just learned that U.S. GDP grew at an anemic 0.2 percent annual rate during the first quarter of 2015…
The gross domestic product grew between January and March at an annualized rate of 0.2 percent, the U.S. Commerce Department said, adding to the picture of an economy braking sharply after accelerating for much of last year. The pace fell well shy of the 1 percent mark anticipated by analysts and marked the weakest quarter in a year.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Our House of Cards
Our House of Cards
As John Williams (shadowstats.com) has observed, the payroll jobs reports no longer make any logical or statistical sense. Ask yourself, do you believe that retailers responded to the very disappointing Christmas season by rushing out in January to hire 46,000 more retail clerks?
Perhaps those 46,000 retail jobs is the BLS telling us that they have to come up with new jobs to report whether or not there are any.
As we have reported on a number of occasions, whenever the price of gold in the futures market starts to rise, massive uncovered shorts are suddenly dumped on the market. As the shorts dramatically increase the supply of future contracts all at once, the supply overwhelms demand, and the price of gold is driven down despite the fact that the demand for gold in the physical market is strong. (Remember, the price of gold is determined in the futures market in which contracts are largely settled in cash and seldom in gold. The physical market is where gold bullion is purchased, not paper claims on gold for speculation.)
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Leading Contrarian Economist: “We Are Coming In On The End Game Here”
Leading Contrarian Economist: “We Are Coming In On The End Game Here”.
To say that the U.S. economy is in trouble would be an understatement. According toShadow Stats economist John Williams, we may be on the very cusp of a crisis so severe that it promises to re-write the entire paradigm. Debt is out of control and foreign holders of U.S. Treasury bonds are getting antsy. Nowhere is this more obvious than in China and Russia, where leaders of the globe’s other super powers are feverishly working to distance themselves from the U.S. dollar by establishing new monetary relationships that completely bypass the world’s reserve currency.
A loss of confidence in America’s ability to manage its fiscal, economic and monetary policy coupled with a continued slowdown in growth could soon reveal what Williams calls “the end game.”
It’s coming sooner rather than later suggests Williams in a recent interview with Greg Hunter’s USA Watchdog:
…click on the link above to read the rest of the article…
