Measured by the common man (or common girl), we’re on the road to ruin. The US has been in decline for decades, but you can’t see that by looking at stocks. You can’t tell it from those who lie about the economy to make their living, but look at longterm real numbers, and you see an empire in decline that just got its wobbly legs kicked out by COVID-19.
The clamor of false profits
Listen to the kinds of false narratives being spun to claim the economy is largely recovering. Call it the relentless and unrealistic belief in a V-shaped recovery narrative or whatever you want to call it, but the nonsense is still flourishing, though not the economy.
I’m going to start telling of our longterm decline by illustrating the falsehood via a stock advisor who wrote an article today to complain that the IHS Markit survey cannot possibly be correct in stating that the services sector of the economy is not improving but has merely stabilized; i.e., the survey says the business economy is neither falling any further nor is it recovering.
This investment advisor argues that the survey is clearly false because it tells him what he doesn’t want to be told. I’ll demonstrate that by tearing apart his own fake argument:
Services are some 80% of the US economy and so we can take their growth or contraction as a pretty good proxy for the economy as a whole….
On that much, we can agree, but …
The seasonally adjusted final IHS Markit US Services PMI Business Activity Index registered 50.0 at the start of the third quarter, up from 47.9 in June and improving on the ‘flash’ estimate of 49.6, to signal a stabilization in service sector business activity.
Really?
Read the rest here: https://thegreatrecession.info/blog/us-in-longterm-economic-decline/