© Sharpy/John VachonJune 1941. Rain. Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
US Q3 GDP was revised up by the BEA to 3.89%, but that's no longer what financial markets react to. They sit and wait for more QE somewhere on the planet to be doled out. Will Americans, if they see this at all, take those numbers, add them to the sweet drop in prices at the pump and spend what they save on more holiday purchases? I'm not saying I know, but I do see that US consumer confidence is down, as is global business confidence - the latter at a five year low.
The Case/Shiller index reports a "broad-based slowdown" for US home prices, and that in the rear view mirror that looks at Q3. So that's not where those 3.89% came from, it wasn't housing (wonder what it was). The Gallup Christmas survey lost 8% of exuberance in one month. What this adds up to is that Americans may not spend all of that saved gas money, and that means there's a
real danger of deflation coming to America too - as if Japanese and European attempts to export their own were not enough yet.
While the
media continue to just about exclusively paint a picture of recovery and an improving economy, certainly in the US - Europe and Japan it's harder to get away with that rosy image -, in ordinary people's reality a completely different picture is being painted in sweat, blood, agony and despair. Whatever part of the recovery mirage may have a grain of reality in it, it is paid for by something being taken away from people leading real lives. US unemployment numbers are being massaged three ways to Sunday, as is common knowledge,
or should be; the amounts of working age people not working, and not being counted as unemployed either, is staggering.
Comment: It is inhuman what Child Protection Services (talk about an oxymoron!) is doing to parents and children based on the most flimsiest of accusations. This is a system that needs a total overhaul, because it is broken. It is traumatizing children who should be with their parents and causing untold emotional heartbreak. The people who enforce such psychopathic rules should be ashamed of themselves. This isn't the first time they've been involved in what should be deemed illegal behavior, but condoned by the state: