Shadowstats.com calculates Key Statistics the way they were calculated in the 1980s and 1990s before Official Data Manipulation began in earnest. Consider Bogus Official Numbers vs. Real Numbers.
Annual U.S. Consumer Price Inflation reported December 17, 2014, 1.32% / 9.02%
U.S. Unemployment reported January 9, 2015, 5.56% / 23.0%
U.S. GDP Annual Growth/Decline reported December 23, 2014, 2.70% / -1.73%
U.S. M3 reported December 15, 2014 (Month of November, Y.O.Y.) No Official Report / 4.81% (i.e., total M3 Now at $16.217 Trillion!) – Shadowstats
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The bull market we’re in now (which is in sort of a hiatus) began around 2001. It has had a few corrections, one certainly being the Global Financial Crisis in 2008. We’ve been through a tough period, but basically it moved from the high $200s – to over $1900 in a ten-year period.
At that point, over three years ago, I believe there was a concerted effort to knock gold back down (which I think has been the central banks in particular) and discourage people from holding it. It has worked. We’ve gone through another horrible correction that has lasted over three years now, seeing the price fall from $1900 to under $1150 at one point.
The sentiment here is kind of like it was at the ’76 bottom and in 2000-2001. Just those two periods were precursors to huge moves in gold and I think this one is the precursor to the biggest move of all, so I would encourage people to hang in there. – John Embry
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The U.S. Added 252,000 Jobs in December; Unemployment Fell to 5.6%… The good news was tempered by the fact that not only did wages fall 0.2% last month, but the wage gain of 0.4% in November was revised down to 0.2%.
What it means – The Employment Situation report for December nicely illustrates what we have been highlighting in the Dent Research Employment Index over the last year – yes, there are more jobs, but the quality of those jobs as measured by income is poor. We are not generating middle-income employment at a pace that will grow the economy.
With the full year of employment on the books, we can discuss our old friend, the birth/death adjustment, which the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) uses to guess at how many new jobs were created at small businesses.
After removing all seasonal adjustments, the BLS reported 2,987,000 new jobs in the economy last year, which works out to 249,000 per month. That’s not bad. But the BLS also reported 1,040,000 new jobs through their mystical birth/death adjustment. If the guessed-at jobs are taken out, then the economy created 1,947,000 jobs last year, or just 162,000 per month. – Harry Dent