January 06, 2011 – The year is off with a bang, hammering us with hype that things are better and the time has come to cash in our gold bullion and get back to the stock market. Perhaps if we hadn’t heard the same song sung all last year as gold kept climbing we would be more inclined to listen.
Have we balanced the budget and wiped out the debt? Did the European sovereign debt crisis bow out with 2010? Did the Fed vacuum up all the excess cash it printed? And what about unemployment?
Aha! We have you there, the government says, pointing to the latest figures (forget that it was more like two steps forward and one step back.) Even in the best light the news is a non-issue. Sure jobs are going to be created here and there each baby step the economy takes forward, and sure the government can use that to make it look like the unemployment situation is improving. But like Evan Esar said, statistics is “the science of producing unreliable facts from reliable figures.”
We need only look about us to see the real state of unemployment. Absent from the data are scores of new homeless people driven to poverty by failed fiscal policy. Many times more have been driven to the edge, frustrated with being unable to find work or having to work multiple jobs just to stay afloat. The prolonged lack of income has wreaked havoc on the credit ratings of countless honorable people and rendered them virtually unemployable. This is the real problem and it will continue to cripple our economy for as long as it persists.
Until the government stops sweeping its problems under a carpet of statistics nothing is going to get better. Except, of course, gold bullion investments.
