US economy gathering steam. Part II

[eatapeach]

Originally posted by Colin@Feb 29 2004, 02:06 PM
Do you have some insight into who manipulated the GDP numbers and when?

i didn't say manipulated, i said fictitious. anyway, here's richard daughty from barron's explaining the gdp in his own special way. read this, then reread what i wrote.

http://www.dailyreckoning.com/home.cfm?loc...qs=id=3769&tp=c

"Suppose you, as a successful capitalist swine, hire a hundred guys to make a hundred widgets, and sell the widgets for a dollar apiece, and thus GDP is $100. So far, so good.

Then a few days pass, and we wake up with a blinding headache in a strange, seedy little hotel on the outskirts of town with a one-eyed woman who says her name is Darla, and when we frantically call in to the office, we find that you raised the price to two dollars, and you also figured out a way to make widgets with only fifty employees!

The hike in price, unfortunately, reduces widget sales by 25%. But GDP jumps to $150! And because you fired half the employees, labor costs plummeted, and the next thing you know Alan Greenspan jumps on an airplane and flies down to visit your factory and give you an award as Proud Poobah of Productivity, which you deserve because productivity has soared.

In the old days, it took a hundred guys to make a hundred widgets. Now it takes only fifty guys to make seventy-five widgets, and you doubled the price to more than make up for it. You're a genius!

But unemployment is up by 50%, total sales volume is down, and inflation has soared to 100%. Only a Fed chairman as clueless as Alan Greenspan could possibly see just an upside in this."

you seem to see an upside in this too, colin