Back out government’s spending on the national credit card, which officially counts as growth, and the U.S. economy hasn’t grown in years. From Jeffrey Tucker at The Epoch Times via zerohedge.com:
Just like clockwork, there is talk of recession in the air. The announcement will come soon and be confirmed by summer. The Atlanta Fed just revised its output forecast for the first quarter to expect a contraction at-2.8 percent. This is very sudden. Only a week earlier, the same tools (GDPNow) had forecast a 2 percent increase in output in the first quarter.
At this point, many people are probably dismissing all these forecasts and big numbers emanating from experts on the public payroll. They have been wrong about so much for so very long. And yet, Wall Street is moved by such data reports, even when the problems with them are so obvious. As they say, the numbers might be fake but they are all we have.
The basis on which this forecast is being made concerns construction spending, and it is truly hard to justify based on industry numbers showing no such thing.
My own thinking: this is a game of catch-up and blame placing. Analytics commissioned by Brownstone Institute—but which can also be intuited by any living adult over the last four years—documents a technical recession since 2022 based on a clearer reading of the best data. Even then, there was never a clear recovery from March 2020 when the global economy was deliberately plunged into a forced depression.
Since those days, not much has made sense in macroeconomic data as conventionally collected and distributed.
There are many problems. Conventional output data counts government spending, even when it is based on debt finance that is ultimately financed by money printing, as positively contributing to GDP. These very years have seen the largest increase in government spending, by any measure, that we have on record in the history of recorded time.
Obviously, this has distorted GDP numbers for years.
