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TODAY'S ECONOMY IS THE SAME AS AMERICA IN 1975. Q1 2015 GDP REVISION.

The Bureau of Economic Analysis workers released the revised numbers to first quarter GDP. In the 21st century, one would expect that government workers could release GDP data monthly and not seasonally adjusted.

As no one uses money anymore — coined metal by weight and fineness — there is little cause to adjust data for seasonality. Gold and silver don't get shipped to "money center" banks by rural farm bankers to earn interest anymore. As there is no money, that kind of banking hasn't existed for tens of decades. Thus, there isn't a seasonality effect in the economy anymore.

Well, GDP has now fallen to about what it was for the first quarter of 1975 during the Greatest Depression.



The change in True GDP as measured in True Dollars™ is quite revealing. All who have lived through these years know how accurate the chart tracks good times and bad times.

Yet, because of the power of persuasion-in-propaganda and peer pressure effects of crowds, most today, believe they have been living in an economic recovery, albeit a slow one, merely because they have heard that sermon repeatedly and are afraid to believe otherwise.

The propaganda isn't true. Americans have been living in the Greatest Depression after having lived through the Greenspan-Bernanke Great Inflation, the biggest credit bubble in the history of mankind.



The year-over-year change yields a much clearer picture. The economy is bettering but hasn't recovered. Not until the line crosses over the zero mark can anyone claim the economy has recovered.


And while the economy crashed after the Banking Crisis of 2008, an inevitable crisis brought on by the Greenspan-Bernanke Great Inflation, the signs of trouble arose by Q2 2006. In spite of claims to the contrary, the last decent economic run Americans experienced began Q2 1994 and ended Q4 2000, with the best of those times ending Q1 1997.

The worst action Federal Reserve central bankers could have done, they did. They did so precisely because Fed Res bankers don't understand capitalism and how capitalism works, at all.

Rather than cut interest rates to near zero and engage in Quantitative Easing, the truest definition of voodoo economics, Fed Res bankers ought to have pushed interest rates higher faster. Cutting rates impaired extant capital bought on credit by enterprisers who operated prudently. To maintain return on capital, such enterprisers were forced to do the only act they could, cut labor.

Meanwhile, even at low rates, new entrants could not come into markets, borrowing credit to buy new capital and thus put Americans to work since even at those low rates, returns to any new capital could not materialize. In short, if Americans aren't workers and thus lack wages, they can't buy goods and services at prices needed to gain returns to capital.

Academician economists with their phony doctrine of economics are quite wrong. Fed Res central bankers have been quite wrong. Congressmen, whether House members or Senators, have been quite clueless.

The true fixes likely never will happen.
  1. Fed Res bankers need to be stripped of their power to set the inter-bank lending rate (Fed Funds Rate) as such a rate is the basis for commercial lending rates.

    Such bankers lack omniscience. They don't know what commercial rates ought to be.

    Instead, rates ought to be set in futures markets. Futures markets are why Americans never starve and never run out of energy.
  2. Congressional-backed mortgage securities need to end, which means so-called Government-Sponsored Enterprises (GSE) such as Federal National Mortgage Association (Fannie Mae) and Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation (Freddie Mac) need to be shuttered.

    Bankers need risk. With the advent of mortgage-backed securities (MBS) guaranteed by successive U.S. Congresses, bankers have lost their bearings and have become imprudent in the practice of banking.

    MBS worked for bankers as the source of structured investment to pay off deposits until such didn't anymore. Think about the perversity of it all.

    Bankers sell credit to borrowers and buy rights of action against borrowers called mortgages. Then bankers sell those rights to U.S. Congresses through their GSE agencies. After bundling mortgages into securities, GSEs sell those MBS to bankers, effectively selling back to bankers the mortgages they originated, but now with risk to bankers stripped out.
  3. By constitutional amendment, all legislators need their taxing authority severely limited. No American should be forced to pay more than 10% to 12% of her or his income in total to all levels of legislators.

    By significantly restricting taxation authority, legislators would have their borrowing capacity restricted significantly.  Thus, legislating would become challenging.

    Each year, there should be contentious fighting by members of the House and Senate as to what gets funded and by how much. Thus, only the most important legislation with the greatest effect for the most people, if not all, should be debated.

    And the same thing should happen in the states and the counties.

    Legislation should be hard to come by. Everything should be a contentious fight among legislators. Legislating should be a pain-in-the-ass, a hard job, so hard that only the most important issues should be debated and decided upon. It should be so hard that only the most tenacious and thoughtful persons should be attracted to do the work.
  4. Working-age immigration needs to be restricted, likely for decades. If Americans want their wages to rise in True Dollars and thus experience a rise in buying power, they must awaken to reality and agitate for restricted immigration, say to no more than 5% of  total population each year.

    Wages and capital are interlinked. Wages are a consequence of producing wealth under efficiency. The more wealth produced and gained by each worker, the higher wages can rise.

    High capital spending causes high wages. Wages rise when capital spending per worker rises.

    Only in proportion as labor becomes pricier that it becomes profitable to use cheaper methods (capital) to amplify labor. Capital spending arises because of likely increasing returns to capital.

    Labor becomes pricier only under a dearth of workers. When there is an abundance of workers, labor is cheap.

    Heed my dictum. Labor makes property. Capital makes property efficiently. 

    Capital becomes a factor in production only if in using capital, workers can produce property in stock or in work cheaper than by producing property in those things without capital. Without capital, there is little reason to organize workers. Without capital, everyone lives at bare subsistence.

    Before the industrial era, almost all Americans were poor, barely living above bare subsistence poverty. Almost all were farmers who traded little.  Farmers had little capital. There were hand tools and maybe a few plow horses.

    The few "wealthy" Americans were those involved in shipping. Ships of shipping, of course, are capital.

    Under the automation of industrialism, true wages or "real" wages if said by economists rose and rose substantially. As Americans added machinery, which, of course, is capital, workers' buying power as expressed in true pay rose.
Both excessive immigration and suppressed interest rates gut the return to capital. Such policies wreck capitalism. The U.S. Congress wrecks the return to capital by expanding immigration and doing nothing about illegal aliens. Fed Res Bankers wreck the return to capital by engaging in Near Zero Interest Rate Policy (N-ZERP).

If Americans desire to live in a golden age, like Americans of the past, say between the 1950s and 1960s, they need to return to living by capitalism. That means the fixes above must happen.

I'm right. Guys like Peter Schiff are right, intuitively, most times, except guys like Peter Schiff don't have the numbers to back up their claims. I do.








To comment about this story or work of the True Dollar Journal, you can @ me through the Fediverse. You can find me @johngritt@freespeechextremist.com

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