Tag: revisions

The Housing Recovery Was Just Cancelled (Again) Due To 5 Months Of Downward Revisions

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Submitted by Tyler Durden on 12/23/2015 10:44 -0500

Exactly one year ago, on December 23, 2014, we wrote that the housing recovery remains cancelled due to 6 months of downward revisions. As we revealed, “for the period May – November, the initial new home sales prints amount to 2.779MM houses. Post revision, the number plunges by 22% to 2.168K.”

It was about as glaringly obvious as it could get:

Fast forward to today when moments ago the Dept of Commerce “pleasantly surprised” everyone when it reported that November new home sales, while missing expectations of a 505K print, “rose” to 490K from 470K in October . Great news: the housing recovery is on track… Just one problem: the original October print was 495K, which if maintained would have meant a decline of 5K in November.So we decided to look at previous reports to see if the Commerce Dept had tried to pull a fast one again as it did last year, and lo and behold, not only were there downward revisions between the November and October “government data”, but as the chart below shows, over the past 5 months the data has been consistently “revised lower” with every incremental release.


Here Is Why Americans Are Suddenly $80 Billion “Poorer” (In Some Government Spreadsheet)

The government is a fucking joke. If the unemployment rate has really plunged from over 10% to under 6% in the last few years, how can disposable personal income be so pitiful?

The government statistics fed to the sheep and unquestioningly reported by the six mega-media outlets are nothing but, lies, propaganda and bullshit.

Open your eyes to see the truth. Look at the decaying office buildings, strip malls, and small manufacturers as you drive our decrepit roads. Look at your own financial situation. Are you better off than you were in 1999? I doubt it. Are you experiencing too little inflation? Is your paycheck going up at a rate higher than the true rate of inflation?

The US Titanic is sinking and you are locked below deck, while the .1% head for the lifeboats and the MSM band plays on.

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Submitted by Tyler Durden on 11/26/2014 09:33 -0500

The final major datapoint of the day was the Consumer Income and Spending data from the US Dept of Commerce’s Bureau of Economic Analysis, the same outfit that yesterday shocked everyone with just how much better US GDP was. Well, today, we learned just where the offset came from. Because while on the surface, both income (+0.2%) and spending (+0.2%) missed expectations of a 0.4% and 0.3%, respectively…

… it was the revised data that the US department of data fudging once again showed why it has long since surpassed China.

Behold what is perhaps the most important data series in all of US eco: Disposable Personal Income. We say behold, because there are some rather massive variations between what the BEA reported a month ago, and what it reported today, as relates to all the data issued since March. To wit:

Essentially, the just reported Disposable Persona; Income print of $13.109 trillion as of the end of October, is where according to the old, unrevised data US houshold income was some time in August. Whatever happened to two months of income?

Which brings us to the other all important number: the personal savings rate. At just reported at 5.0%…

… something strucks us: this number was reported at 5.6% last month.

And sure enough, since Disposable Personal Income flows into personal savings, net of outlays, it was clear that American savings would be dramatically impacted as a result of the massive data revision.

Sure enough, this is how the US personal savings rate looked like based on the old and just revised data.

 

And, the punchline: US savings in absolute terms, an $80 billion decline in savings from the old September print and the latest, post-revision.

So there you have it: in order to “suggest” that the US economy had grown by a far greater than expected run-rate, the BEA was forced to revise away personal income, and “assume” these had instead been invested in the US economy, in the form of a surge of durable goods purchases. Sure enough, while both incomes and savings tumbled, spending magically surged:

So if that “statistical” amount of money you thought you had saved in the BEA’s savings.xls spreadsheet just dropped by 10%, fear not dear Americans: it was all used for a good cause: to fabricate a much stronger than expected Q3 GDP number.

Source: BEA