There is Paper Money, there is Fool’s Gold, and then there are macroeconomic statistics, which make the previous two look reliable:
The nation’s economy is managing to grow modestly, reports Monday showed, despite high U.S. unemployment and growing alarm about Europe’s debt crisis.
The nation’s economy is not growing. There is now a near-complete disconnect between the map and the territory. The debt-deflation monster has barely begun to tear apart the economy and already the BEA has devolved into a bizarre Orwellian MinEcon. This was inevitable, given the way Keynesians turned “animal spirits”, or as they are now known, “consumer confidence” into a fetish that articulated a concept of lying one’s way into prosperity.
No doubt future generations will look on the period from 1950 to 2010 as an age lost to deception, where growth was believed to be the result of debt and deceit, national prosperity the result of outsourcing jobs, and industrial growth through free trade. The observable fact is that there is another word for a “service economy” and that is “an unproductive economy with high unemployment”.