No, GDP Did *NOT* Advance
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2018-10-07 07:00 by Karl Denninger
in Monetary , 489 references Ignore this thread
No, GDP Did *NOT* Advance *
[Comments enabled]

Oh Bill Still!  Oh former Libertarian candidate for President who proclaimed this on stage:

"Crashes are caused by just one thing, and that's bubbles.  Bubbles are caused by just one thing and that's banks being in complete and total control of the quantity of the american monetary system in complete and total contradiction of the American Constitution."

But now, Mr. Still has found his #MAGA hat and his wife is worse, shilling his videos all over the Internet supporting outright monetary fraud and, in addition, shilling for herself with MLM "dietary supplements"!

Principles?  What are those?  Gee, did you forget what you actually said Mr. Still?

Well, let me remind you what the facts are from the US Treasury's own web site:

DatePublic DebtSoc. Sec./MedicareTotal
9/28/201815,761,154,524,132.405,754,903,659,047.7821,516,058,183,180.20

9/29/2017

14,673,428,663,140.905,571,471,352,912.5720,244,900,016,053.50
Difference1,087,725,860,991.50183,432,306,135.211,271,158,167,126.70

Now the GDP of the nation stands, as of last read, at $20,411,900,000,000.

Four quarters ago it stood at $19,588,100,000,000, a difference over the last year of $823,800,000,000.

In other words GDP is actually negative because the expansion of federal debt is greater than the expansion in GDP in dollars.

This is a matter of arithmetic -- not politics.

The problem is that in real terms you need to earn at least 6.23% to break even on a government (or any other) bond.  At any rate of return under 6.23% you are losing money in real terms if you buy such a security.  Of course right now Treasuries are all earning less than this (a lot less!) yet the above is a mathematical fact.

That is, in actual monetary terms the real inflation rate is 6.23%, not 2%.  The Fed can lie and the BLS and BEA can lie with their CPI tables but arithmetic does not lie and each dollar of monetary expansion by the federal government is a dollar of inflation -- period.

This sort of misdirection can be gotten away with for a while.  It was in the 2000s, and in the 1990s.  But it cannot be gotten away with forever because the damage in purchasing power done to everyone by this behavior is both real and immediate and it is this very behavior by governments and private banks that cause both bubbles and the resulting crashes.

Trump knows this and does not care.  He believes he will be out of office before it all blows up in his face.  Bush believed that too, and he was wrong.  Obama ran the same crap after the 2008 crash and got away with it for the eight years he was in office.

Trump will not get away with it.  We are running a 6.23% fiscal deficit during an expansion in the economy.  That's outrageously large and in fact belies the truth -- there is no expansion at all; the economy is in fact contracting and yet the false signals being sent to employers and others leads them to do uneconomic things like borrow money to buy back stock.

It is this very uneconomic behavior that in fact leads to crashes because it causes the valuation of assets to be falsely priced far above their actual value due to the perception that this insanity can and will go on forever, and thus whenever you wish to sell you will be able to at a higher price.

When reality comes calling prices do not "correct" they crash because there is utterly no underpinning for the valuation metric that you have been using and due to the effects of compounding actual valuations are half or less of where prices are trending!

It is stupid to continue to prance around and call this sort of economic distortion "good", but that's what I expect from our lying, fake-news media and serial liars and bubble blowers such as Larry Kudlow.

But the true test of whether someone is actually nothing more than 2-bit ***** or believes what they say comes when someone who has made public speeches on the insanity of such behavior and in fact ran a campaign for the highest office in America on this very basis turns on a dime and supports the people doing it now.

**** you Mr. President and Congress both -- you're setting up the worst collapse and crash since the 1930s.  Double-**** you, however, to those who have claimed in the past to be supporters of monetary and fiscal truth but have discarded same due to a putrid and fraudulent infestation in Washington DC that happens to be buttering one's bread via Youslob horsecrap and MLM schemes.