{"id":35096,"date":"2018-06-14T06:49:18","date_gmt":"2018-06-14T11:49:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=35096"},"modified":"2018-06-14T06:49:18","modified_gmt":"2018-06-14T11:49:18","slug":"the-dangers-of-investing-based-on-phony-government-statistics","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=35096","title":{"rendered":"The Dangers of Investing Based on Phony Government Statistics"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Dangers of Investing Based on Phony Government Statistics<\/a><\/h3>\n
\n

President Donald Trump recently took to Twitter<\/a> to boast, \u201cThe U.S. has an increased economic value of more than 7 Trillion Dollars since the Election. May be the best economy in the history of our country. Record Jobs numbers. Nice!\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWe ran out of words to describe how good the jobs numbers are,\u201d reported Neil Irwin of the New York Times<\/i>, amplified in a Trump retweet<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\"Increase\"<\/p>\n

If you believe the headline numbers, joblessness is at a generational low with the economy booming.<\/p>\n

Trillions in nominal value added to the stock market since Trump\u2019s election. GDP up over 3% in the second quarter. 223,000 jobs added in May. Unemployment at an 18-year low of 3.8%.<\/p>\n

On the surface, this all paints a beautiful picture for the economy and stock market. But dig a little deeper, and the numbers aren\u2019t quite as bright they appear. All that glitters is not gold.<\/p>\n

Headline Unemployment Number Is Fake News<\/strong><\/p>\n

Donald Trump himself put his finger on one of the main flaws with the unemployment number back when he was a private citizen.<\/p>\n

\u201cUnemployment rate only dropped because more people are out of labor force & have stopped looking for work. Not a real recovery, phony numbers,\u201d he posted<\/a> on September 7th, 2012.<\/p>\n

The headline unemployment number isn\u2019t any less phony in 2018. Though it has improved under Trump\u2019s presidency \u2013 in large part because of his pro-growth tax cuts and deregulation \u2013 the statistic is still derived from a dubious formula.<\/p>\n

Back in 2012, Trump rightly pointed to the large numbers of workers who had dropped out of the labor force but weren\u2019t counted among the ranks of the unemployed.<\/p>\n

The labor force participation rate currently comes in at just 62.7%. That means 33.7% of the population is currently not employed in the labor force. The vast majority of these jobless Americans aren\u2019t among the 3.8% officially \u201cunemployed.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u2026click on the above link to read the rest of the article\u2026<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Dangers of Investing Based on Phony Government Statistics President Donald Trump recently took to Twitter to boast, \u201cThe U.S. has an increased economic value of more than 7 Trillion Dollars since the Election. May be the best economy in the history of our country. Record Jobs numbers. Nice!\u201d \u201cWe ran out of words to […]<\/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":[7844,353,4190,3898,11467,20514,14502,824,827],"class_list":["post-35096","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","tag-donald-trump","tag-gdp","tag-investing","tag-labor-force-participation-rate","tag-money-metals-exchange","tag-phony-government-statistics","tag-stefan-gleason","tag-unemployment","tag-united-states"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35096","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=35096"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35096\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":35097,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35096\/revisions\/35097"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=35096"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=35096"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=35096"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}