The Atlanta Journal would have you believe that our 2008 Meltdown
Depression is on the mend. It’s
not. We graduate and immigrate about
300,000 folks each month, so adding 200,000 jobs over the past 4 months is
weak. Workforce participation at 62.5%
is a better measure to determine that although 145 million Americans have jobs,
92 million don’t.
The post below adds a new dimension to the discussion and makes the point
that we need more relevant data to measure this economic disaster.
Norb Leahy, Dunwoody GA Tea Party Leader
Guest Post: U.S. Gasoline Consumption Plummets By Nearly 75%
Submitted by Tyler Durden on
05/30/2014 21:30 -0400
Submitted
by Jeff Nielsen via BullionBullsCanada
blog,
Regular readers are
familiar with my narratives on the U.S. Greater
Depression, and (in particular) some of the government’s own charts which
depict this economic meltdown most vividly. The collapse in the “civilian
participation rate” (the number of people working in the economy) and the “velocity
of money” (the heartbeat of the economy) indicate an economy which is not
merely in decline, but rather is being sucked downward in a terminal (and
accelerating) death-spiral.
However, even that
previously published data, and the grim analyses which accompanied it could not
prepare me for the horror story contained in data passed along by an alert
reader. U.S. “gasoline consumption” – as measured
by the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) itself – has plummeted by nearly 75%, from its all-time
peak in July of 1998. A near-75% collapse in U.S. gasoline consumption has
occurred in little more than 15 years.
Before getting into an
analysis of the repercussions of this data, however, it’s necessary to properly
qualify the data. Obviously, even in
the most-nightmarish economic Armageddon, a (relatively short-term) 75%
collapse in gasoline consumption is simply not possible. Unless we were dealing
with a nation whose economy had been suddenly ripped apart by civil war, or
some small nation devastated by a massive earthquake or tsunami; it’s simply
not possible for any economy to just disintegrate that rapidly, without there
being some ultra-powerful exogenous
force also at work.
So how can this raw data,
produced by the government itself, be explained? To begin with; the government
chooses to measure U.S. gasoline consumption in a very odd manner: by measuring
the amount of gasoline entering the domestic supply-chain rather than by
measuring actual consumption at the other end of the supply-chain – i.e. “at
the pump”.
Why
does the U.S. government, which (among other things) leads the world in the
manufacture of statistics not produce any simple/direct measurement of gasoline
consumption?
How can the St. Louis Fed produce nearly
100 different charts on gasoline and diesel prices (for any/every price-category which can be imagined by
these statistics geeks), but not a single chart on gasoline supply/demand?
There are several reasons
for this unbalanced, anomalous, and simply absurd statistical methodology.
First of all; the reason why the U.S. government produces a near-infinite number
of charts on prices is because prices are what the Gamblers (i.e. bankers) use
as the basis for their $100’s of trillions in gambling in the rigged
casinos which the bankers call “markets”.
While supply/demand data is
of utmost importance in the real world; the banker-gamblers don’t dwell in the
real world. As regular readers already know; their derivatives
casino, alone, is roughly twenty
times as large as the entire global economy. To the bankers; the “real
world” is nothing but fodder
for their insane gambling.
Why use this data, at all,
since it is such an inferior/distorted means of measuring U.S. gasoline
consumption? Because the EIA uses exactly the same data to publish its
own “estimates”
of U.S. gasoline consumption:
Note: Product supplied
measures the amount of gasoline that went into the supply chain and is used as a proxy for gasoline consumption. [emphasis mine]
The other half of this
ridiculous statistical hodge-podge, where endless quantities of
trivial/irrelevant price data are trumpeted, while any/all data which actually
measures the (real) economy is suppressed (if not buried entirely) displays a
government desperately trying to hide this massive economic collapse.
If
you choose to measure the amount of gasoline leaving U.S. refineries and
entering domestic inventories and call this “gasoline consumption”; you
can hide the actual collapse in gasoline consumption – until those retail
inventories are overflowing, and there is simply no more room in the storage
tanks.
This is what we see today
in the U.S.: a gasoline market which had been deliberately-and-dramatically over-supplied with gasoline at the
wholesale end of the supply-chain (the refineries) has now practically ground
to a halt. The same nation which previously amazed the world as it accumulated
more automobiles and more miles of highways per capita than any nation on Earth
(and by a huge margin) now has such an insane glut of gasoline that it’s
massive chain of refineries have had to simply turn off the taps – until this
pathetically anemic economy manages to burn-off some of that glut.
This conclusion becomes even
more visible/obvious when we view the gasoline data just from the start of the mythical
“U.S. economic recovery” to the present. At the start of the “U.S. recovery”;
U.S. gasoline consumption was at a rate of 52 million gallons per day (already
more than 20% below the 1998 all-time peak). In the five years since the start
of this pretend-recovery; U.S. gasoline consumption has fallen all the way to
18 million gallons per day.
Since
the beginning of “the U.S. economic recovery”; U.S. gasoline consumption has
plummeted by nearly 2/3. As the pseudo-recovery began, and supposedly
“strengthened”; U.S. refineries were ordered to fill up the inventories of
their dealer network, in anticipation of the increased gasoline
consumption which would have occurred in any real “recovery”.
But there never was an
increase in U.S. gasoline consumption, because there never was a U.S. economic
recovery. Rather, the Greater Depression has simply (and relentlessly)
continued to pulverize the U.S. economy like a meat-grinder. To hide this
devastation (as well as is possible), the government produces a wide array of
its pseudo-statistics,
that all contain myriad “adjustments” – which make it possible for these
liars-with-numbers to distort the statistical picture of the U.S. economy
beyond recognition.
Meanwhile, any/all statistics
which measure raw data (and thus cannot be perverted with “adjustments”)
are either suppressed (like the civilian participation rate), or not even
measured, at all – as is the case with U.S. gasoline consumption. At the retail
end; none of the “sales” statistics are adjusted for inflation, not even with
the absurdly-fraudulent “CPI” numbers.
By not deflating sales data
(at all) the collapse in U.S. gasoline consumption “at the pump” is hidden
within all this unreported
inflation. As explained in previous commentaries; it is this same,
unreported inflation which allows the U.S. to convert its large, negative, GDP
readings (which would otherwise reveal the Greater Depression) into “economic
growth”. It is this same, unreported inflation which allows the government
(and employers) to hide the fact that U.S. wages have collapsed by more
than 50%.
But what the
liars-with-numbers cannot hide (any longer) is the collapse in U.S. gasoline
consumption which has accompanied the continued, downward spiral of the Greater
Depression. The storage tanks are now all full. The only way to (temporarily)
hide the collapse in U.S. gasoline consumption any further would be to construct
even more storage facilities. However, there is no possible economic
justification for increasing storage capacity in a market of
steadily/relentlessly declining demand.
Indeed, the exact opposite
is true. The U.S. economy of the 21st century (a mere hollowed-out
husk of what it was only 20 years earlier) will require less and less
gasoline storage facilities over time, reflecting a supply network for a
steadily shrinking market. As the
One Bank completes its plundering of the U.S. economy, and completes its
transformation of the U.S. Middle Class into the
Working Poor, it is also simply using up more and more of its
economic lies.
The Great
Inflation Lie will continue to allow the U.S. government (and other Western
governments) to crank-out absurd/imaginary positive numbers for GDP. It will
continue to allow the U.S. government to crank-out absurd/imaginary numbers for
retail sales (and hide the ongoing
collapse of the entire U.S. retail sector).
But it can’t hide the fact
that U.S. refineries have nearly stopped producing gasoline for the
most-motorized society/economy the world has ever seen. It can’t hide the fact
that there haven’t been so few people working in the U.S. economy (on a
percentage basis) in 35 years.
Readers who are stubbornly
faithful to the plethora of pseudo-statistics which the U.S. government uses to
hide this collapse may have been skeptical of my original
denunciation of the “U.S. economic recovery”. They may have been more
skeptical with assertions that this Wonderland
Matrix of lies is being used to hide a Greater Depression.
However, there is no
further room for skepticism when official, government numbers indicate a near-75%
collapse in U.S. gasoline consumption over a mere 15 years, and a 65%
collapse in consumption since the start of the (supposed) Recovery. Numbers
such as this can only be encapsulated with acronyms like “DOA”.
When
we look at the EIA’s “gasoline consumption” numbers, and when we see the St.
Louis Fed’s chart of the U.S. velocity of money (heartbeat of the U.S.
economy); we don’t see an economy which is dying. We see an economy which is
already dead.
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