Home » Posts tagged 'statistics' (Page 5)
Tag Archives: statistics
US Economic Output – “Ugly, but Fleeting”?
US Economic Output – “Ugly, but Fleeting”?
On the Uselessness of Aggregate Economic Statistics
We actually hate talking about GDP. It mainly measures consumption and leaves out the bulk of the economy’s production structure – which has led to the completely erroneous, but often repeated notion that “the consumer represents 70% of economic activity”. In reality, consumption represents somewhere between 35% and 40% of all economic activity. The manufacturing sector is actually not the “smallest sector of the economy”. It is stillthe by far largest sector in terms of total output.
Moreover, “GDP growth” is really not informative with respect to whether or not the activity measured is profitable and therefore indicating that wealth is created. Given that government consumption is a major component of GDP, there is obviously a lot of wasteful spending that is counted as “growth”.
Furthermore, in a bubble era, when credit expansion ex nihilo is running wild, a lot of investment in fixed assets will eventually be discovered to have been malinvestment. Such spending is also added to “growth” while it occurs, but in reality, it is just a waste of scarce capital. Simply put, there isn’t much worth measuring, because the truly important things cannot really be measured anyway. Even so, it makes a lot more sense to occasionally look at the gross output tables per industry rather than GDP.
Now let us think for a moment about Wednesday’s quarterly GDP report. What does it even mean that the economy has allegedly grown by “0.2%”? This strikes us as a completely absurd number. Given that it actually represents quarterly growth annualized, it means that “real growth” last quarter was 0.05%. Really? Someone has measured the economic output of the entire country and found out it grew by 5 basis points? This sounds like a tiny fraction of the margin for error rather than a meaningful number.
…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…
There’s Trouble Brewing In Middle Earth
There’s Trouble Brewing In Middle Earth
For the second time in three years, I’m fortunate enough to spend some time in New Zealand (or Aotearoa). In 2012, it was all mostly a pretty crazy touring schedule, but this time is a bit quieter. Still get to meet tons of people though, in between the relentless Automatic Earth publishing schedule. And of course people want to ask, once they know what I do, how I think their country is doing.
My answer is I think New Zealand is much better off than most other countries, but not because they’re presently richer (disappointing for many). They’re better off because of the potential here. Which isn’t being used much at all right now. In fact, New Zealand does about everything wrong on a political and macro-economic scale. More about that below.
I’ve been going through some numbers today, and lots of articles, and I think I have an idea what’s going on. Thank you to my new best friend Grant here in Northland (is it Kerikeri or Kaikohe?) for providing much of the reading material and the initial spark.
To begin with, official government data. We love those, don’t we, wherever we turn our inquisitive heads. Because no government would ever not be fully open and truthful. This is from Stuff.co.nz, March 19 2015:
New Zealand GDP grew 3.3% last year
New Zealand’s economy grew 3.3% last year, the fastest since 2007 before the global financial crisis, Statistics NZ said. Most forecasts expect the economy to keep growing this year and next, although slightly more slowly than in the past year. For the three months ended December 31, GDP grew 0.8%, in line with Reserve Bank and other forecasts. That was led by shop sales and accommodation.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
U.S. Oil Glut Story Grossly Exaggerated
U.S. Oil Glut Story Grossly Exaggerated
It’s called the “age of propaganda” where truth matters little and comes out later in so called revisions. Take the recent spate of economic data points from the Kansas City Fed which said that economic activity not only stalled but wasnegative at -4 vs expectations of +1. The recent durable goods statistics also show contraction as well.
Yet we see the services PMI at a 6 month high. How can these divergences be possible? Well for one, some statistics are hard while others are estimated/massaged and others are seasonally adjusted or estimated (only to be revised later). In oil, the same thing appears to be occurring as we speak. The near record pace of oil storage additions in some weeks nearing 8-10 million barrels per day comes at a time when all indicators are that oil production is slowing.
Related: Oil Price Speed Limit Presaging An Age Of Austerity?
Even using the EIA’s own data, production is up some 500,000 per day since October or 3.5M per week. So how can more than two times that be added to storage while gasoline demand accelerates to 5% year over year from low single digits? Refinery maintenance is part of it, yes, as well as seasonality as people drive less in absolute terms, so as production continues this would explain storage adds, but to this magnitude?
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
10 Charts Which Show We Are Much Worse Off Than Just Before The Last Economic Crisis
10 Charts Which Show We Are Much Worse Off Than Just Before The Last Economic Crisis
If you believe that ignorance is bliss, you might not want to read this article. I am going to dispel the notion that there has been any sort of “economic recovery”, and I am going to show that we are much worse off than we were just prior to the last economic crisis. If you go back to 2007, people were feeling really good about things. Houses were being flipped like crazy, the stock market was booming and unemployment was relatively low. But then the financial crisis of 2008 struck, and for a while it felt like the world was coming to an end. Of course it didn’t come to an end – it was just the first wave of our problems. The waves that come next are going to be the ones that really wipe us out. Unfortunately, because we have experienced a few years of relative stability, many Americans have become convinced that Barack Obama, Janet Yellen and the rest of the folks in Washington D.C. have fixed whatever problems caused the last crisis. Even though all of the numbers are screaming otherwise, there are millions upon millions of people out there that truly believe that everything is going to be okay somehow. We never seem to learn from the past, and when this next economic downturn strikes it is going to do an astonishing amount of damage because we are already in a significantly weakened state from the last one.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
OVERdevelopment, OVERpopulation, OVERshoot
OVERdevelopment, OVERpopulation, OVERshoot
William Ryerson’s introduction to the new book OVERdevelopment, OVERpopulation, OVERshoot.
MOST CONVERSATIONS ABOUT POPULATION begin with statistics—demographic data, fertility rates in this or that region, the latest reports on malnutrition, deforestation, biodiversity loss, climate change, and so on. Such data, while useful, fails to generate mass concern about the fundamental issue affecting the future of the Earth.
In reality, every discussion about population involves people, the world that our children and grandchildren will live to see and the health of the planet that supports all life. In my roles as president of Population Media Center and CEO of the Population Institute, I spend most of my time in developing countries, where many of my friends and acquaintances are educated and prospering. But I also know individuals who are homeless, unemployed, or hungry. The vast majority of people in these societies, regardless of their current status, do not enjoy a safety net. They live from day to day in hopes that their economic circumstances will improve. Abstract statistics on poverty are irrelevant to families struggling to secure the food, water, and resources needed to sustain a decent life.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Economy Finally Reaches “Escape Velocity,” Heads South
Economy Finally Reaches “Escape Velocity,” Heads South
It’s hard to measure the growth rate of a vast, complex economy with just one number, accurately, and on a timely basis.
The Chinese found an ingenious solution. They decree the growth rate and announce it in advance, and that’s about what the number says when it comes out. It’s faster than any other major country can produce its GDP numbers. It avoids nasty surprises and doesn’t need messy revisions. Whether or not establishing statistical data by decree is an accurate reflection of reality is a hotly disputed topic.
But then, the accuracy of any statistical data is a hotly disputed topic.
In the US, it’s a slog to get to the final answer. Quarterly changes in GDP, as measured by the Bureau of Economic Analysis, come in a series of estimates. The first estimate gets all the press, but subsequent revisions in the second and third estimates can be significant. Further revisions follow over the years. By the time the BEA has a fairly good handle on what actually happened back in the day, no one cares anymore.
So the Atlanta Fed started a new approach in 2011. The forecasting model is supposed to reflect a more immediate picture of the economy. Taking into account economic data when it is released, the model adjusts its GDP forecast accordingly and closer to real time. It has plenty of quirks. It’s jumpy as it reacts to incoming monthly data that is itself highly volatile and subject to revision. But it’s a good indication of where the economy has been going over the past few months.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
The Prosthetic Imagination
The Prosthetic Imagination
Two news stories and an op-ed piece in the media in recent days provide a useful introduction to the theme of this week’s post here onThe Archdruid Report. The first news story followed the official announcement that the official unemployment rate here in the United States dropped to 5.5% last month. This was immediately hailed by pundits and politicians as proof that the recession we weren’t in is over at last, and the happy days that never went away are finally here again.
This jubilation makes perfect sense so long as you don’t happen to know that the official unemployment rate in the United States doesn’t actually depend on the number of people who are out of work. What it indicates is the percentage of US residents who happen to be receiving unemployment benefits—which, as I think most people know at this point, run out after a certain period. Right now there are a huge number of Americans who exhausted their unemployment benefits a long time ago, can’t find work, and would count as unemployed by any measure except the one used by the US government these days. As far as officialdom is concerned, they are nonpersons in very nearly an Orwellian sense, their existence erased to preserve a politically expedient fiction of prosperity.
How many of these economic nonpersons are there in the United States today? That figure’s not easy to find amid the billowing statistical smokescreens. Still, it’s worth noting that 92,898,000 Americans of working age are not currently in the work force—that is, more than 37 per cent of the working age population. If you spend time around people who don’t belong to this nation’s privileged classes, you already know that a lot of those people would gladly take jobs if there were jobs to be had, but again, that’s not something that makes it through the murk.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
truthinesslessness
truthinesslessness
Nothing is stable, nothing is straightforward, everything is fixed, and nothing is fixed. O nation of busboys and WalMart greeters, awake and sing!
Can an empire founder on sheer credulousness? After last Friday’s jobs report, I think so. For a culture that luxuriates in statistical analysis (and the false idea that if you measure enough things, you can control them), it is rather amazing that we absolutely don’t care whether the measurements are truthful or not. Hence, an economist (sic) such as Paul Krugman of The New York Times might ask himself how it is that Zero Interest Rate Policy only trickles down to places where hamburgers are sold. PK was at it again in his Monday column, yammering about “rapid job growth,” “partying like it was 1995.” Wise men like him are pounding this country down a rat hole faster than you can say Romulus Augustulus.
Apparently the US Bureau of Labor Statistics missed the job bloodbath in the oil industry, especially over in Frackville where the latest western phenomenon is the ghost man-camp (along with ghost pole dancing parlors). It’s a veritable hemorrhagic fever of job layoff announcements: 9,000 here, 7,000, there, thousands of thousands everywhere — Halliburton, Schlumberger, Baker Hughes — like an Ebola ward in the oil services sector. Not to mention the cliff-drop of capital expenditure, meaning even steeper job losses ahead, Casey Jones. But nobody notices, I guess because they’re out at Ruby Tuesdays eating things bigger than their heads. Are the portions getting smaller, or are their heads shrinking?
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Republicans To Investigate NASA Over Climate Data Tampering
Republicans To Investigate NASA Over Climate Data Tampering
With record heat (and drought) in the west and record cold (wet and snow) in the east, the global warming game-playing continues every day but the climate-gate rhetoric has increased vociferously since we first noted three weeks ago, the data that has been so relied upon to ‘prove’ global warming’s trend was in fact manipulated. What The Telegraph called “the most extraordinary scandal of our times” – that of the “seasonally-adjusted” seasonal raw global temperature data – is about to be investigated by Congress. As Daily Caller reports, California Republican Rep. Dana Rohrbacher exclaimed “expect there to be congressional hearings into NASA altering weather station data to falsely indicate warming & sea rise.”
This began, as The Telegraph previously noted, with claims that the underlying data used to justify practically every study p[roving global warming has, in fact, been manipulated…
Although it has been emerging for seven years or more, one of the most extraordinary scandals of our time has never hit the headlines. Yet another little example of it lately caught my eye when, in the wake of those excited claims that 2014 was “the hottest year on record”, I saw the headline on a climate blog: “Massive tampering with temperatures in South America”. The evidence on Notalotofpeopleknowthat, uncovered by Paul Homewood, was indeed striking.
…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…
Don’t Believe The Headlines: Canada’s Latest Job Numbers Don’t Look Good
Don’t Believe The Headlines: Canada’s Latest Job Numbers Don’t Look Good
After two months of shrinking job numbers, it looked like Canada had broken the streak with this morning’s StasCan report showing an increase of 35,400 jobs, and a decrease in the jobless rate to 6.6 per cent, from 6.7 per cent.
But that is just about the sunniest number there is in this jobs report. Dig a little beneath the surface, and what you find is a struggling job market.
First and most importantly, all of the net increase in jobs was accounted for by an increase in “self-employed” individuals, of 41,000.
Many economists are suspicious of this category, because “self-employed” does not equal “making money.” It could be that more than 40,000 Canadians found their entrepreneurial spirit last month and launched their own startups, but it’s just as likely many are putting a brave face on their unemployment.
The number of salaried jobs actually fell by 5,400 from a month earlier, and the number of full-time jobs of any kind fell by 11,800. That was offset by an increase of part-time jobs of 47,000.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
The Grand Manipulation
The Grand Manipulation
Gerald Celente, editor of the Trends Journal, a subscription-based publication for which I write, has permitted King World News to republish my most recent article from the Trends Journal. This makes the article available to you from a free site. In place of me writing yet another expose of the non-existent jobs reported today by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, read my article, The Grand Manipulation:
The government’s economic reporting has no credibility. In the face of depressed Christmas sales and the closure of retail chains such as Radio Shack, do you think retailers rushed out in January to hire 45,900 new retail employees?
In the face of declining restaurant traffic, do you think 34,600 new waitresses and bartenders were hired in January?
Read my sometime coauthor Dave Kranzler’s take on today’s payroll jobs report:
http://investmentresearchdynamics.com/todays-employment-report-is-the-biggest-lie-theyve-told-to-date/
If the government will not even tell us the truth about jobs and inflation, how can we believe the government when it tells us, without supplying any evidence, that Russian tank columns have entered Ukraine? Americans need to come to terms with the fact that they live in The Matrix, a world composed of fake information designed to control thought and behavior.
50 Numbers From 2014 That Sound Fake But That Are Actually Real
50 Numbers From 2014 That Sound Fake But That Are Actually Real.
2014 was quite a bizarre year, wasn’t it? The past 12 months brought us MH370, Ebola, civil war in Ukraine, civil unrest in Ferguson, the rise of ISIS and the fall of the Democrats in the midterm elections. Our world is becoming crazier and more unstable with each passing day, and I have a feeling that things are going to accelerate greatly in 2015. But for the moment things are relatively quiet as much of the world stops to celebrate the holiday season, so now is a good time to look back and see where we have been over the past year. The facts that I am about to share with you sound false, but they are all quite true. If you doubt any of these facts, just click the link on the number to find the source. It has been said that truth is stranger than fiction, and that was definitely the case during the past 12 months. In no particular order, the following are 50 numbers from 2014 that sound fake but that are actually real…
2.5 – Researchers have discovered that characters in cartoons for children are 2.5 times more likely to die than characters in adult dramas. But as long as those characters look cute and make funny noises it must be okay.
$4.20 – The price of ground beef just hit a brand new record high of $4.20 a pound. Exactly 10 years ago, it was just $2.21 a pound. What do you thinkClara Peller would say about this?
The Most Common Error in Economic Debates |
The Most Common Error in Economic Debates |.
The Problem of Contingent Data
Have you ever been in an argument about whether we should raise taxes and then someone tosses out a real whopper? “The top tax rate for decades after World War II was over 90% and look how the economy boomed!”
Or perhaps you read a Paul Krugman column where he said that, “there’s a big problem with the claim that monetary policy has been too loose: where’s the inflation [he means rising prices]?”
Both the Internet troll and Professor Krugman are making the same mistake. Let me explain.
Economists love to use the Latin phrase ceteris paribus. It means all else being equal. It’s great in a thought experiment. For example, what would happen if we made a change in America today? Suppose we criminalized all use of fossil fuels. We can’t really do that (I hope!) but it can serve a pedagogic purpose.
It should be pretty obvious that the consequence of shutting off the motors is to shut off production, and people will soon starve. If this isn’t obvious, then you don’t need my blog entry on economic argumentation. You need The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels by Alex Epstein.
Every economist is aware that in comparing a historical time to the present, or comparing two different countries all else is not equal. There is not one difference between the immediate postwar period and today. There are innumerable differences. You can’t just assume that the one difference you’re debating is the only one that matters.
