Today on The Janssen Report: major entertainment is distracting most people from reality. People don’t seem to care about the true state of the economy or safeguarding their life savings and pensions. The US government (like most other governments throughout the world) is painting an optimistic picture by presenting (phony) numbers that they can sell as positive. Yet, most numbers out there are really discomforting and signal a recession. Economic recovery? I don’t think so.

In a recent article Charles Hugh Smith of OfTwoMinds.com presents 4 charts about the state and local governments in the US clearly showing the bad shape the economy is in. Wages and salaries are barely keeping up with inflation, real household incomes are down 8.5% since 2000 and state and local government taxes and spending are rising at twice the rate of inflation.

Paul Craig Roberts argues that the most recent jobs numbers are completely out of tune with reality. As I have also pointed out several times before, the actual rate of unemployment is much larger than the “official” number that’s presented.
There are several forces at play here that are EXCLUDED from the “official” numbers:
the labor participation rate has been growing steadily over the past years, much of which can be explained by the growing number of discouraged workers (people who stop looking for a job);
By far most of the jobs that are created are in domestic service jobs, such as waitresses, bartenders, retail clerks, transportation, warehousing,finance and insurance, health care and social assistance.
Many fulltime jobs are replaced by parttime jobs.

As Paul Craig Roberts concludes: “clearly, this is not an economy that has a future”.

So, what are you going to do?

Sources:
Germany’s financial watchdog worried over scale of Forex manipulation (Wall Street Journal):http://www.wsj.com/articles/germanys-…
Here’s the next crisis “ nobody saw coming” (Charles Hugh Smith):http://charleshughsmith.blogspot.nl/2…
The US economy continues its collapse: http://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2015/…

Cheers,
Marco Janssen
www.thejanssenreport.net