A Stitch in Haste

A growing number of macroeconomists seem to think so:

But when you subtract investment, net exports, and government spending from GDP, you arrive at what should be the sum of consumption spending plus inventory investment... Trouble is, this ... line clearly trends down, and that can't remotely be explained by inventories. The implausible behavior is even more clear when plotted as growth rates...

In other words, if

Y = C + I + G + X

but

I + G + X > Y

then C must be negative (thinking in terms of growth rates), regardless of any Communist propaganda to the contrary. Damn the totalitarianism of arithmetic!

Need some hard numbers?

It seems from this that in the year to September the man on the street spent 17 per cent less on daily necessities and toys than he did the previous year.

But this is not what other official statistics say. They say that retail spending for the year to September was 13.6 per cent greater than it was the previous year ... and that this retail spending alone was almost twice as great as the remainder number we calculated for all personal consumption spending.

How is it possible? It is not. The latest GDP figures from the mainland simply do not add up.

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More on China's bogus economic statistics from Big Picture, RGE Monitor.

A Communist dictatorship lying about their economic statistics? That would be unprecedented, right?


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"Market Communism" is the most obnoxious oxymoron since "original sin." And those who get duped by the fraud, or who just don't care so long as China keeps building "neat-o" skycrapers, are running out of excuses for their increasingly inexcusable perspective.