More Head-Scratching Economic Stats

It is not surprising that you can’t trust anything coming out of an administration the head of which reminds me of Spiro Agnew in his mendacity in pursuing every opportunity to enrich himself, and whose attorney general clearly just flat-our lies.  Another ZeroHedge post points out a weird and unprecedented divergence in economic statistics supposedly measuring the same thing–the size of and growth in our economy.   The number for gross domestic product tends to get more attention than that for gross domestic income, and typically the numbers end up the same after rounds of revision.  The latest and final revision of first quarter GDP came in at 2%, up a huge .7 percentage point from the prior revision, due to a bizarre change in net export numbers.  GDI was revised to a negative 1.8%.  So there is a 3.8% difference in the statistics, which is beyond troubling.  So if you average the numbers we have no growth.  Be nice if we could trust what comes out of the administration, but you can’t.  (ZH Post)