Misery Index All-Time Highs
We Are In A Depression, NOT Recession
(Listen to audio version of me reading👆)
It is said that when your neighbor loses their job, we’re in a recession.
When you lose your job, we’re in a depression.
We have been in a depression…
When you dig in to the real metrics and use the ones not manipulated by the government you see a whole new world open up to you.
Lifting the government’s “fog of war” enables clear vision and leads to clearer thinking.
Ronald Reagan was famous for branding Jimmy Carter with his “misery index” number when he was in office.
First let’s look at what the misery index is…
The index takes the basic formula of inflation plus the unemployment number and adds them together to tell you in a general sense how healthy the economy is.
When Carter and Reagan were battling it out Carter had numbers in the 20s and that was considered very high and people were struggling.
Rationing, shortages, and lines at gas stations were familiar sights in that time period.
Things were not great. Much of it caused by price controls which were thought to be necessary because of…you guessed it…too much currency printing.
We were funding NASA, the Vietnam war, and LBJs “Great Society,” just to name a few things the USA was spending too much on.
So other countries began to call the US’s bluff. They wanted their gold back. US didn’t have enough. So, Nixon “temporarily” shut the gold window August 15, 1971.
The day the dollar and all world currencies became backed by nothing. Zero. Not worth the paper they are printed on.
The dollar is debt. An IOU for true money. Think about that. Repeat that slowly.
This is why the system needs more and more debt. Balanced budgets aren’t actually possible. Anyone living in reality and trying to “save” and using the old rules are getting, and will continue to get, annihilated.
1971’s “Nixon shock” was a default of the US currency and a soft default of the country on its promises to those holding the dollar and dollar denominated assets.
America is living in borrowed time…
The embarrassment of this event 50 years ago and the rest of the decade led the government to rework and fiddle with the measurements of inflation and unemployment to obscure the true situation.
I’m sure you are shocked to learn that.
Government once again only having their best interest in mind to make themselves look better and pass blame.
Once politicians are held to account and fundamentals return through sound money these types of “adjustments” will be near impossible to make.
With an immutable ledger and clear transparency these opaque government shills will not be able to hide money movements and where the money is flowing.
Aid to Ukraine, or paying for “infrastructure,” or for studying cow farts, will now be able to be monitored by the public.
This will incentivize good players to join in public service and keep the leftover ones in the system on their best behavior.
The current REAL misery index…
Forty-Three!
Double what it was during Carter years. Now most people will say it’s lower however they are using the new government metrics that hide what’s going on.
If you use the metrics we use to use from 1980 then the real number is off the charts.
Real Inflation of 18%
Plus
Real Unemployment of 25%
Equals, a misery index of 43%!
Another way to compute if you want to go further down the rabbit hole…
Take asset prices getting crushed to add to basket. “Wealth effect” to take in to consideration. Instead of employment.
Many people might have assets they refinance to pull equity out of to live off of.
So the utilization of a paycheck may be a lagging or misleading indicator.
So you could use the S&P 500 (pension/401k) or you could use the GDP potentially to see at a macro scale as a substitute and get an idea of the overall health of the country.
No matter what way you look at it, we are being lied to by our government because they think we are too stupid to figure it out.
And the truth is things are really bad. The current official 3.6% unemployment number is a joke, when you can’t get anyone to work anywhere…
All I want to know is how and where are so many people getting money to live off of?
Credit cards? Refinancing of debts?
Buckle up!
Stay strong,
Brandon
Ps. The rest of the week we have a couple parts on why inflation is the path to communism and why we have been lied to about deflation. The solution lies in the opposite of what the puppet masters are telling us…