{"id":20870,"date":"2016-06-04T08:57:02","date_gmt":"2016-06-04T13:57:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=20870"},"modified":"2016-06-04T08:57:02","modified_gmt":"2016-06-04T13:57:02","slug":"guided-by-nonsense","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=20870","title":{"rendered":"Guided By Nonsense"},"content":{"rendered":"

Guided By Nonsense<\/a><\/h3>\n
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\u201cRead the directions and directly you will be directed in the right direction.\u201d \u2014 Lewis Carroll<\/p>\n

U.S. consumers are at it again.\u00a0 After a seven year hiatus they\u2019re once again doing what they do best.\u00a0 They\u2019re buying stuff.<\/p>\n

According to the\u00a0Commerce Department<\/a>, 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.\u00a0 That marks an increase of 1 percent, and is the biggest one month increase since August 2009\u2026nearly seven years ago.\u00a0 Indeed, this is quite an achievement.<\/p>\n

The consumer, you know, is the primary engine of U.S. economic growth.\u00a0 Without consumption GDP doesn\u2019t go up; rather, it goes down.\u00a0 Moreover, in a debt based money system, when GDP goes down the whole financial debt structure breaks down.<\/p>\n

We don\u2019t condone it.\u00a0 Certainly we\u2019d prefer an honest hard money system where savings and investment drives growth as opposed to borrowing and spending.\u00a0 But our preference has no bearing on reality in this matter.<\/span><\/p>\n

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. \u00a0Naturally, we want to know what\u2019s going on.\u00a0 Namely, we ask, where\u2019s the money coming from?<\/p>\n

Where\u2019s the Money Coming From?<\/strong><\/h3>\n

Middle class incomes, the last we recall, scored a big fat rotten goose egg over the last decade.\u00a0 By this we mean incomes haven\u2019t gone up.\u00a0 To the contrary, they\u2019ve going down.<\/p>\n

Our understanding of this unfortunate situation isn\u2019t based on anecdotes we overheard at the corner donut shop.\u00a0 Nor is it based on experiences shared by the\u00a0crusty fellows<\/a>\u00a0casting their lines off Belmont Veterans Memorial Pier.\u00a0 Instead, we have hard evidence and solid proof.\u00a0 Specifically, we point to the distilled findings of\u00a0Pew Research<\/a>\u00a0released earlier this month.<\/p>\n

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Guided By Nonsense \u201cRead the directions and directly you will be directed in the right direction.\u201d \u2014 Lewis Carroll U.S. consumers are at it again.\u00a0 After a seven year hiatus they\u2019re once again doing what they do best.\u00a0 They\u2019re buying stuff. According to the\u00a0Commerce Department, personal consumption expenditures (PCE), which is the primary measure of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[12043,13974,353,13975,421,2137,11763,13972,827,834,13973],"class_list":["post-20870","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","tag-economic-prism","tag-financial-debt","tag-gdp","tag-honest-money-system","tag-income","tag-middle-class","tag-mn-gordon","tag-nonsense","tag-united-states","tag-us","tag-us-commerce-department"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20870","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=20870"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20870\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20871,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20870\/revisions\/20871"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=20870"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=20870"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=20870"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}