The U.S. government is losing credibility. That is both an obvious and a useless observation without a sense of the consequences. Maybe, there are none. Maybe, the accumulating doubt concerning Benghazi, IRS intrusions, and NSA confiscation of privacy are wearing thin. If the latter proves correct, how will the people express their disillusion: “Voting with their feet,” so to speak? A glaring vulnerability is the gap between falling income and inflation. The government’s numbers are propaganda, and seem to have worked. The Fed, Bureau of Labor Statistics, reporters, and the academics who are paid to polish Goebbelism into a scholastic veneer, state that annual price inflation is short of 2%. John Williams, proprietor of Shadow Stats, estimates that if the Bureau of Labor Statistics used the same methodology for calculating the CPI as in 1980, the monthly figure released and disseminated to the public would be 9.4% (as of November, 2012).
The Thomson Reuters/University of Michigan consumer sentiment index fell sharply to 74.1 in early June from its final-May reading of 79.3 and an early-May reading…
Consumer, Retail, Consumer Confidence, Stocks and Housing – Don’t Believe The Media Boilerplate Hype
This is an update of the permanent page of Retail, Consumer Confidence, Housing and Stock Price Charts which will be updated whenever new data is available.…
This chart is now in the Economic Chart Gallery and will be updated regularly. [singlepic id=62 w=480 h=360 ]Click to view full size. While the…
Consumer Sentiment at More Than 4-Year High blared the headlines. Here’s what you really need to know about that.
U.S. Poverty: Census Finds Nearly Half Of Americans Are Poor Or Low-Income
First Posted: 12/15/11 02:03 AM ET Updated: 12/15/11 10:05 AM ET
WASHINGTON — Squeezed by rising living costs, a record number of Americans – nearly 1 in 2 – have fallen…
The Consumer Sentiment Survey of Americans, created by George Katona at the University of Michigan in the early 1950s and known today as the Thomson-Reuters University of Michigan Surveys of Consumers, has included a remarkable question about the reas…
The preliminary August reading on the consumer sentiment index fell to 54.9 in early August, down from 63.7 in July, and the index has fallen for three straight months in the Thomson Reuters/University of Michigan survey.
Lowest in more than 30 years.
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Last November, the University of Michigan and Reuters stopped allowing third parties to update their Michigan Sentiment Index Charts. Maybe that’s because they didn’t want…