Happy Days Are Here Again

I don’t write a whole lot about economics because there are so many smart people in Blogovia who know a lot more about it than I do. But, I do wonder about these numbers they are touting every week and every quarter.

Perhaps I’m being paranoid in thinking that if the entire Wall Street establishment could be hoodwinked by a Texas snake oil hustler into believing that Enron was creating a completely new market that was too complicated for their their pretty little heads to understand, then maybe somebody could be cooking the books a teensy, weensy bit with these economic numbers. Or at least selling them dishonestly. (Nah. They couldn’t get away with that.)

The Angry Bear, one of those smart guys, shows how “the BLS has magically discovered a way for jobless claims to drop week after week, without the number of jobless claims ever actually falling.”

Not that there’s anything wrong with that. Alternatively, they could just hang a sign saying “Mission Accomplished.” That’s a good one, too.

It makes me wonder about these rather, shall we say, grandiose productivity and GDP stats. I mean, c’mon. Are people really working that much harder and more efficiently, all of a sudden? Everybody I know spends every spare minute on line, talking on the phone or bitching about how they haven’t had a raise in 2 years. hmmmmm.