Gold News

Fake Growth, Fake Cuts

Choose your favorite phony policy – neither works...

WE INHABIT a world of frauds and counterfeits...bunkum and claptrap, writes Bill Bonner in his Daily Reckoning.

That's what makes it so much fun!

It brings tears to our eyes one day...and seizures of laughter the next. So many imposters...so little time.

As you know, neither Europe's austerity policies nor America's growth policies have worked. Why? Because they are both phony.

In Europe, governments collectively spent 44.8% of GDP in 2000. Today it is 49.2%. A big increase. That's not austerity...that's stimulus. The Europeans are letting out their belts, not cinching them up.

And now that the phony austerity is not working, a new batch of leaders wants to try something new — phony growth. Francois Hollande, France's new president, says he will hire more government workers and spend more money to promote "growth." He also says he'll raise taxes on the rich to 75% of marginal income (up from 41% now) and increase the "wealth tax." How he thinks you get real growth out of this foul mixture is a mystery. The government already directs and consumes half the nation's output...and the economy is flat. How will it do better with more money? Instead, the French will be wasting resources...squeezing the most productive part of the economy...and getting poorer.

Meanwhile, the US has stuck to its phony growth policies. The feds run huge deficits to 'stimulate' the economy.

(Reuters) — The government posted a budget deficit of $125 billion in May, more than twice the level registered in the same month last year.

The May deficit, which was close to analyst forecasts, followed a rare month of surplus in April that was due to higher budget receipts during tax season but also other temporary factors.

So far this fiscal year, the budget deficit stands at $844.5 billion, narrower than at the same time a year ago.

Under the government's accounting system, October is the opening month of fiscal 2012. During fiscal 2011 which ended September 30, the budget deficit totaled $1.296 trillion.

We saw last week where all that money has gotten us. Nowhere. Family wealth has dropped back to levels of 20 years ago.

But wait...maybe it's not the feds' fault. While the Europeans pretend to cut back, maybe America's stimulus program is a fraud too. That's what a pair of professors at Yale claim. This 'recovery' is different from previous recoveries, they believe, because the US is following a "hidden austerity program:"

...there is something historically different about this recession and its aftermath: in the past, local government employment has been almost recession-proof. This time it's not. Going back as long as the data have been collected (1955), with the one exception of the 1981 recession, local government employment continued to grow almost every month regardless of what the economy threw at it. But since the latest recession began, local government employment has fallen by 3 percent, and is still falling. In the equivalent period following the 1990 and 2001 recessions, local government employment grew 7.7 and 5.2 percent. Even following the 1981 recession, by this stage local government employment was up by 1.4 percent.

Without this hidden austerity program, the economy would look very different. If state and local governments had followed the pattern of the previous two recessions, they would have added 1.4 million to 1.9 million jobs and overall unemployment would be 7.0 to 7.3 percent instead of 8.2 percent.

So, dear reader, pick your poison. Phony growth? Or phony austerity? Neither works. 

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New York Times best-selling finance author Bill Bonner founded The Agora, a worldwide community for private researchers and publishers, in 1979. Financial analysts within the group exposed and predicted some of the world's biggest shifts since, starting with the fall of the Soviet Union back in the late 1980s, to the collapse of the Dot Com (2000) and then mortgage finance (2008) bubbles, and the election of President Trump (2016). Sharing his personal thoughts and opinions each day from 1999 in the globally successful Daily Reckoning and then his Diary of a Rogue Economist, Bonner now makes his views and ideas available alongside analysis from a small hand-picked team of specialists through Bonner Private Research.

See full archive of Bill Bonner articles

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