Here’s a novel solution to our economic woes. Let’s just redefine what makes for a "good" economy. From today’s Arizona Republic: [Thanks L!]
Arizona’s economy may seem ugly right now but when you look at it from a historical context, it looks pretty good, an Arizona State University economics expert said Tuesday.
Home building is back to normal, the weaker dollar is boosting exports, high gas prices encourage conservation, unemployment is fairly low, and medical and government jobs are growing more than 1,000 a month, said Lee McPheters, director of ASU’s JPMorgan Chase Economic Outlook Center.
"Let’s redefine good. Good means it could be worse," he said to members of the Economic Club of Phoenix at the Arizona Biltmore Resort & Spa.
McPheters, one of three economics experts speaking to the group, wore a white hat because he got to present the good news portion of the program.
It sounds like McPheters should have worn a dunce cap instead.
Then there is today’s inflation numbers. The Reality Fairy has obviously not just left Arizona, but her influence seems to have disappeared on a national level as well. Take for example last month’s "improvement" in gas prices:
High gasoline prices got you down? Come to the land of seasonal adjustment, where the sun is always shining and gas prices fell 2 percent last month.
What? You paid more? Well, in the real world, gasoline prices did rise by a sharp 5.6 percent in April from a month earlier, but the way that the Bureau of Labor Statistics adjusts the figures to smooth out seasonal oddities, it appeared to be down in the consumer price index released Wednesday.
Another branch of the very same U.S. government, the Department of Energy’s Energy Information Administration, said average retail gas prices actually shot up 9.5 percent in April from March.
The skies over the "Cuckoo’s Nest" are getting awfully crowded.
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twist -
“Wall Street Likes Freddie Mac’s New Math”
http://www.forbes.com/markets/2008/05/14/freddie-mac-losses-markets-equity-cx_md_0514markets30.html
and don’t get me started on Douglas Feith. There’s definitely something in the water this week. Igor says, “wonky”
All this fudgery has to come out eventually, right?
Or can they just continue to do ‘creative’ accounting a al Enron?
The rug is getting pretty full from all the stuff swept under it
John-
I’m not certain which is my favorite quote from the Forbes article:
It sounds like accounting should be moved from the business departments of colleges and universities to the fine arts department- it appears that creativity has become the most important aspect of bookkeeping.
The other goodie:
The problem with Syron’s quote is, of course, that the housing whole housing mess is unmanagable and unreasonable- so losses will be too.
Igor says “no clue”
California man loses 9 HOMES to foreclosure.
Shall we redefine “stupid” now, too?
http://www.financialpost.com/most_popular/story.html?id=512526
twist -
A University in any era is first and foremost a theology school. If you look at the campus where I’m studying poetry, it’s easy to pick out the local temple. So the accounting classes are already occurring in the part of the school where the priests are trained. Level 3 is, literally, an article of faith.
Liberal Arts is now relegated to peripheral bits of the place, and don’t get a whole lot of attention. Fine Arts (painting, sculpture, etc.) in this part of the world is at a college founded by that glorious fraud, Anna Leonowens. One of the teachers there participates with me and three others in the “4477 club,” a little nest of poets, but we certainly aren’t as creative as the current bunch of accountants!
Well, once the government starts flagrantly fudging the numbers to deceive the populace (or those that aren’t looking, anyway), why shouldn’t everyone else start as well? In the era of no personal responsibility, honesty seems to have become the exception rather than the rule…
You see twist, what isn’t in that report is a “hidden” government calculation. Yes, energy went up 5.6% last month, however your dollar depreciated 5.6% last month because Bennie & the InkJets have the presses running at full steam ahead.
So the increase in gas prices is almost entirely due to the devaluation of your currency. And you thought the government was lying…. (well, maybe).
Leggo
Sweet Mother of the Great Thunderer!!
When I did my undergrad in Econ at ASU (before they built the business library) it at least had a reasonable reputation. There wasn’t anyone there that I would call stark, raving mad. Not at the Business School, anyway.
I remember visiting ASU back in the mid 80s, and seeing that the campus rag, the State Press actually published Rush Limbaugh’s column regularly. I found that frightening.
I mean, ASU was never any academic paradise. But, but… oh, hell.. what’s the use.
A white hat. Really.
(Still muttering to self…)
This wouldn’t have happened if Alan Greenspan were alive!!!
Wow.
“Good means it could be worse.”
Someone actually said that?
Yossarian,
Your comment on Al is funny and quite true.
Who wore the black hat? Pollack? Butler? Crow? Napolitano?
“Let’s redefine good. Good means it could be worse.”
Wow, that’s simply brilliant. What Newspeak!
Now I see why it’s always a good time to buy.
Agnostic-
What they all should have worn was a lie detector. Or maybe we should just go by the fact that their lips are moving.
Twist – that sounds like that start of a new political system to me. You can be elected to office only if you are willing to wear a polygraph at all times speaking to a public audience, with a red light that blinks faster when the probability increases that you are lying and all data from the box released for public analysis.
Of course, some of our pols like Osama. er, Obama could probably beat it, so once shown to have lied without detection, an officeholder would need to be immediately removed.
Jim-
Isn’t that liable to leave us with a dearth of elected officials? Then again, I suppose that’s one way to reduce government spending.
Speaking of reality fairies, I just read an eloquent blogpost by Sharon Astyk about the “Tinkerbell economy”:
“We have a Tinkerbelle economy – in Peter Pan we’re told that every time you say “I don’t believe in fairies” one drops dead. The same is effectively true of our present economy – every time someone actually admits that they don’t think the magical wish-fulfillment fantasy that is our market system can fix it, a little piece falls down dead. So it is important that the media and public figures say, as loudly as possible, “I do believe in market fairies. I do believe in market fairies” so as to drown out any doubts we might have, caused, say, by the actual evidence that we’re getting poorer….
“The truth is that as long as the voices keep saying so loudly that everything will be all right, most Americans have no idea that they need to make fundamental changes – we’re being told this is just a downturn, and that if we all believe in market fairies hard enough, we can keep it from being bad. Alan Greenspan tells us that the housing market will bottom out in 2009, and we’ll see the market saturation stabilize. But how on earth is that going to happen, with thousands of unsold, foreclosed upon houses that no one wants even at 50% of their appraised value?
“The fact is, just saying you believe in fairies doesn’t make Tinkerbelle appear at the bottom of your garden. And as unpleasant as it is to hear the bad news, unless people know that it is going to get worse, they won’t start using what resources they have left in a coherent way – instead of starting gardens and dumping cars and relying on carpools and public transport, moving towards the more stable informal economy, they will try, as long as they can, to maintain their basic lifestyle. And that only brings about a greater disaster. But only a big pile of fairy corpses will be visible enough to make this clear.
“I’m dropping market fairies as fast as I can. Because I don’t believe.”
Igor’s word “nomoney”