TRUE DOLLAR JOURNAL

Nicholas I of Russia once referred to Ottoman Empire as the "sick man of Europe" because the Ottoman leaders had let themselves become beholden to Europeans.

Today, all of Europe is the sick man of Europe precisely because the 500 million individuals living in their respective countries have turned over their sovereignty to a mishmash consisting of the European Union and the Eurozone banking system.



Of late, economic commentators everywhere ponder what could happen if Germany, France and the like fall into recession. It's all rather silly to read.

The Eurozone countries have been in permanent recession  since Q1 2008. Yet, unquestioning reports of news media continue to report that economies of European countries are growing as measured by GDP.



Far too many don't stop and start to think about much of anything. Governments don't experience crisis when True GDP is growing. When True GDP rises, ceteris paribus, true tax receipts rise, workers' incomes rise and so forth.

How could anyone believe True GDP is growing if European governments are having problems collecting taxes to pay interest on bonds? To believe otherwise is to reject reality right before one's eyes.

If you wonder why Spaniards, Portuguese, Italians and Frenchmen can't pay their bills, well they can't because their economies are shrinking and not growing.

Far too many are so indoctrinated, their minds so easily manipulated. Even when reality stares into their faces, they reject their own common sense because "an expert" with a Ph.D. or a TV teleprompter reader or a politician hasn't told them what to believe.





Here is the growth between Q1 2002 and Q1 2008.



And here is the decline between Q1 2008 and Q3 2014.

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And here is a forecast from 2007 through the full year of 2014.

Methodology

GDP data comes from the Federal Reserve, which gets the data from the OECD. Using OECD data, the Federal Reserve reports GDP for the individual countries in euros.

For each period, the quarterly GDP in euros gets converted to U.S. dollars using the published cash exchange rate for the end of that quarterly period.

The conversion of quarterly GDP expressed in dollars then gets normalized, removing the effects of monetary accretion by converting dollars of that period into True Dollars™ using a proprietary deflator.

Academicians use an erroneous method when deflating GDP from current GDP to so-called real GDP. To learn more about their amazing error, read INFLATION REVEALED! "REAL GDP" AND FEDERAL RESERVE BANK UNITS, right here on Bizarro Theater.