On December 3, 2014
Economist John Williams is not buying the recent 3.9% GDP upward revision. Williams explains, “No one I know thinks we are growing at 3.9% other than they are trying to sell a bill of goods to the markets, specifically the currency markets. 3.9% is nonsense. You had 4.6% growth in the second quarter and 3.9% in the third. Here you had two quarters at close to 4%, and we have not seen anything like that since 2003. This is the strongest economy we have seen in 11 years, and I can tell you Main Street USA is not seeing that. . . . If you understate inflation, which the government does, you overstate inflation adjusted growth, and that is probably the biggest problem in the GDP report.”
Recently, the U.S. deficit passed the $18 trillion mark, but using honest accounting, Williams says the debt picture is much worse, “Using generally accepted accounting principles with expenses and obligations, what you are seeing is the actual deficit. Instead of being half a trillion dollars last year, it was more like $6 trillion in the same length of time. The gross federal debt right now is $18 trillion. If you add on the unfunded liabilities such as Social Security and Medicare, you are approaching $100 trillion in terms of total federal obligation. There is just no way that can be covered. . . . The government, long term, is bankrupt.”
That brings us to the U.S. dollar. Williams says, “Right now, we have a big distortion in the market, and that is the strength of the U.S. dollar. I contend the dollar should be getting much weaker, and indeed it’s going to turn very sharply very soon, and that will be an approximate trigger for a major upturn in inflation. The reason the dollar is strong right now . . . the U.S. economy is booming, if you believe the statistics. Main Street USA doesn’t believe the statistics. The rest of the world is in recession, and guess what? We’re in recession too. We’re just not reporting the numbers as accurately as the rest of the world.”
Williams has revised and pushed back his hyperinflation forecast to begin in 2015 and not this year. Williams, now, expects a big upturn in the price of gold and oil next year. Williams explains, “The issue remains the dollar. What is distorted in the system right now is the dollar’s strength. It’s the strongest it’s been in some time. It’s over stated for multiple reasons ranging from outright manipulation to overstatement of economic growth and other games that have been played. That’s going to reverse shortly. As the dollar sells off, you will see inflation pick up. Part of the reason why oil is where it is now and part of the reason why gold is where it is now is because of the dollar’s strength.”
So, what about the future? We start with the not-too-distant past of six years ago. Williams says, “We are still living in the throes of the panic of 2008. What the central banks did at that time, specifically the Fed and the Treasury, was to take actions to push all the issues into the future. They didn’t do anything to solve the basic problem. The banking system is still in trouble. It is far from solvent, far from normal. You don’t have regular bank lending. If you had regular bank lending, the economy would really be much stronger. It’s not.” Williams goes on to say, “People outside the United States know America is in trouble, and they know the dollar is in trouble. It’s not going to take much to trigger a reversal of the current circumstances. It could be an unusually weak economic statistic, and believe me, those are coming.”
Source: USA Watchdog