GDP Report: Spending Lies

As I looked over another fraudulent, U.S. GDP report, I could hardly believe my eyes. In concocting its latest GDP number, the U.S. Commerce Department reported that consumer spending had risen by 1.6 % in the second quarter.

Having recently written a commentary which focused on the huge plunge in U.S. retail sales, I didn't even have to review the data to know that this was a total fabrication.

For the benefit of readers, I will review that data. U.S. consumer spending was flat in April (i.e. unchanged). It (supposedly) rose 0.2% in May. In order for U.S. consumer spending to have risen by an aggregate 1.6% in the second quarter (as reported by the government), June consumer spending would have had to rise approximately seven times the amount of May consumer spending.

Sadly, the Commerce Department refused to include the consumer spending number for June, only the fabricated number for the second quarter. The reason is obvious: there is no rational number for June consumer spending which could create a coherent set of data.

Keep in mind that U.S. June retail sales plummeted 0.5%, after a much large drop of 1.1% in May. There is simply no possibility that U.S. June retail sales could be a large, negative number, while U.S. consumer spending for June could be a larger, positive number.

In other words, this is not the case of some statistician making a dubious adjustment or estimate in order to come up with this final total for second quarter consumer spending. This is a matter of a statistician not liking the numbers he was looking at, so he simply erased those numbers and wrote in new ones.

While we're talking about fabrications regarding consumer spending, given that retail sales in May collapsed by -1.1%, the reported 0.2% gain in May consumer spending is also not a rational number -- but almost certainly another fabrication. Thus, even the initial fabrications of data weren't good enough for the U.S. government, so it is apparently resorting to re-fabricating numbers.

For those optimists (naïve zealots?) who still want to believe that the reported U.S. consumer spending could be true: two separate private sector organizations both estimated that U.S. consumer spending for June was either flat or falling -- hardly the enormous leap higher which would be required for the official U.S. number to be remotely plausible.