OBAMA’S PHONY RECOVERY
By DICK MORRIS
Published on TheHill.com on February 14, 2012
President Obama, faced with no recovery from the recession as he enters an election year, has come up with a handy political gimmick: Fake the statistics.
The economic data that portend recovery are totally and completely inventions of Obama’s political operation. The reality is that no recovery is taking place!
Economist James Fitzgibbon, of the Highlander Fund, explains how cooked the economic statistics on which the president bases his claims of recovery really are.
Begin with “gains” in the stock market. Fitzgibbon explains that they are no indication of changes in the public mood because the public isn’t doing the investing anymore. He notes that HFT (high frequency trade computers) now “account for 80 percent [of the market’s] daily business. No one else is left because they lost their money in 2008 and the public has fled the market … Total NYSE volume is 67 percent lower on average than in 2008. Volume is 29 percent lower this year compared to 2011. The prices [have] no serious meaning.”
Have consumers, as alleged, started borrowing again? Not really. Fitzgibbon explains that “credit use has surged only because the Obama administration changed the student loan program to a direct program and those loans are now counted as part of this metric. It is not comparable to anything prior to 2011.” And, he adds ominously, “massive credit card use as measured against actual verifiable sales shows the increase is in borrowed funds to pay for food! Not my idea of a healthy sign.”