John Galt at Shenandoah does a ton of economic analysis. Some of it is pretty technical, with charts and graphs, referencing technical market trading terms that I, frankly, don’t always follow. But, if you read it regularly you can pick up a lot of very interesting economic information. He’s had a number of posts that show how the unemployment numbers the govt. throws out are “seasonally adjusted” and routinely revised after the fact. For people who think the govt. has and reports the best information on the economy, the seasonal adjustment nonsense may come as something of a shock. It would also probably be a shock that the govt. routinely “revises” the old numbers (based on “more complete” estimates, one might argue) and that the revised numbers are routinely worse than the ones reported with great fanfare when they were new. Once the shock has worn off, one could be forgiven for coming to one of two conclusions: 1) the numbers reported are a wild-ass guess, and not a particularly good one at that, or 2) the numbers are being deliberately manipulated for political purposes. Which conclusion you reach is probably a function of how conspiracy minded you are and/or how evil you believe the folks running the government are.
Anyway, John Galt is worth a read on a regular basis.
The reason I mention this today is that I’ve been meaning to link to a 25 part series he wrote starting in November last year. It’s a fictional account of what might happen if the powers that be decided to allow the dollar to crash and use the ensuing chaos to create the socialist utopia they seem to want in a matter of days, rather than a piece at a time as they are doing now. It’s pretty well written, I found it compelling, and it’s also scary as hell to realize that an economic collapse is a tailor-made opportunity to end the United States as we know it and that most of the tools necessary to take advantage of such a situation are already in place.
He calls it a “blovel”, which I assume is short for “blog novel”. It isn’t a short read, but I really urge you to make the time. All 25 parts are collected in one place. It’s called “The Day the Dollar Died.“
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