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From 1959 to 1964, Rod Serling created and directed the
ground-breaking series "The Twilight Zone" which will never be
forgotten by anyone growing up in the 1950's with a black and white TV. The
weekly episodes revealed with ironic, perplexing and totally unexpected
results, what happened to otherwise normal people whose lives were forever
changed once they were transcended into a parallel world where different
rules applied. This altered world correlates in many ways to the US economy
today as millions of people are realizing that nothing our government says
seems to be real, and the rules we thought applied, don't any more.
For example, the price indexes continue to be manipulated down
with hedonic adjustments which continually change price weights to always
favor lowered-priced, over higher-priced, goods. This manipulation in the
price indexes virtually guarantees that GDP, which is a price-adjusted number,
will grow 1.5 to 2 percent each and every year, even if there is no real
economic growth at all! Moreover, the White House has created a novel way
to measure how it has created or saved 640,000 jobs through economic
stimulus. Only in a world where rules no longer apply would you see a big
brother government claim they created 640,000 jobs when, in fact, over
640,000 jobs were actually lost in the last three months alone. The surge
in the headline unemployment rate to 10.2 percent, and the broad measure of
unemployment (the U-6) which hit a mind-numbing 17.5 percent, make a mockery
of the economic stimulus package.
I'm also not alone in pointing out that over the past 12 months
the Bureau of Labor Statistics Birth Death Model has added 850,000 mythical
jobs to the Payroll Employment Survey. By all accounts, this data is false
and is a stunning example of statistics created in outer space where only
happy talk is allowed, and, unbeknownst to the people, psychological warfare
is actually taking place against them behind the scenes.
The official numbers are so bad and inaccurate that a business
has emerged to show what the real economy actually looks like. (See John
Williams' excellent "Shadow Government Statistics" at www.shadowstats.com).
In this world of illusion, the government wants you to look the
other way. They certainly don't want you to see that less than half of the
credit losses that will need to be taken have been taken, for home mortgages,
credit cards, and toxic commercial real estate loans. And that's not all.
Economic statistics that show real declines (but at a slowing rate of
decline) are advertised as increases, and even though new records have been
set for the length of time that workers have been collecting unemployment,
and filings for early retirement, food stamps and social security disability
have spiked, these facts are rarely reported.
Government tricks are wearing thin and consumer confidence is
waning as a massive credibility gap begins to widen between the people
actually living in a real nightmare they have never before experienced, and
the world as reported by government statistics and markets. This has caused
concern on Capitol Hill that restive peasants may gather in the streets and
go after bankers with their pitch forks when these same bankers should be
contributing to PACs in the coming election year.
Past recessions were caused by an overbuilding of inventories
that needed to be corrected. This recession is far worse, however, and it mirrors
a 1930s-style depression that needs to purge a massive over-extension of
credit. The next few years are going to be rough for many people living on
the edge, and nothing, in my view, will change until new good paying jobs are
created. Remember that in any recession, meaningful job growth lags the
official end of the recession by 12 to 24 months, so we can expect
unemployment to continue well into 2011 for sure.
It's unfortunate that Rod Serling has passed on because if he
were alive today, he would be filled with plenty of ideas for a killer
episode of his program, showing how propaganda and the Fed's printing press
can be used to wipe out jobs, eliminate prosperity, and rob savers. The cast
of characters would be played by real unemployed people playing truly
heart-wrenching roles. The economy desperately needs new scriptwriters.
Richard
Benson
SfGroup.org
Richard
Benson is the founder of The Specialty Finance Group ("SFG") was
founded in 1989 as a financial broker to private finance companies,
introducing them to major financial institutions that would provide them with
equity, subordinated debt, and senior credit facilities using the Capital
Market.
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