And you have to read pretty deeply to find that the new home-sales report from the Census Bureau “fell to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 355,000 in November, an 11.3 percent drop from October and its lowest rate since April. The numbers were much lower than analysts had predicted and seemed to belie trends in other housing data that gave hope the industry was stabilizing.”
Source link: http://blog.mises.org/11310/didnt-make-the-front-page/
Didn’t make the front page
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Reality starting to bite… as time goes by despite all efforts by governments to conceal it it’s going to become more and more apparent that the global economy has run out of gas and is slowly coasting to a stop. What we live in slowly disappears from around us.
BB
Many – otherwise rational – people I talked to are convinced we were “talked into” this crisis through the media. If the reports had been nicer in the press, they assume there would have been no dramatic consumption breakdown!
They hate the messenger of bad news.
Artisan, this is because of the widespread belief that the economy is like the magic buildings in that Monty Python sketch: It stands up provided all involved believes in it.
Live by empiricism, die by empiricism!
Rather than revealing the imminent death, the quack empirical doctors conceal the truth from the terminally ill patient.
It’s on the business page. Turn the page and you will discover that incomes rose last month. Did it rise in your neighborhood?
Maybe it did in the neighborhood in the list editors. Conflicting economic reports are evidence of two parallel economies and the class war that is in progress.
We all know that government economic information is cherry picked.
It’s also why newspapers are becoming more and more obsolete. It’s what McLuhan called “government by news leak”. In other words, propaganda. Any inconvenient news that contradicts their preconceived notions gets barely a mention. Any fluffy “good news” press release from the government – that doesn’t add up when scrutinized – gets trumpeted like it’s gospel coming down from the mountain.
It’s also a product of self-improvement book culture. There are a lot of people who really think that we can just “positive think” our way out of this mess and that monetary policy and banking law really doesn’t matter. In other words, there is nothing scientific or rational to it.
I saw it up close and personal in southern California during the peak of the housing bubble. Comments like, “Bubble? There is no bubble. That’s just negative media talk.” or “Sure, housing is really expensive but you can still do it. Just think positive and maybe in a few years you’ll be making enough money to pay for it… and if not, perhaps you were just too negative… besides, they’ll (government, Fed) will do something.” or “Don’t worry about your credit card debt, you can just take out a home equity loan or something.”
Mass self-delusion. It’s the only way a system like this can exist.
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