Recently I joined Jeff Tucker of the Brownstone Institute on an article about the Herculean task of trying to figure out what's actually happening

Are We Already in Recession? - by Peter St Onge

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2024-07-07 00:30:03

Recently I joined Jeff Tucker of the Brownstone Institute on an article about the Herculean task of trying to figure out what's actually happening in the economy.

I’ve covered some of these in recent videos, including failing to count homeless people as unemployed, calling welfare spending economic growth, and undercounting inflation — perhaps by a lot.

Thing is, if the official numbers are wrong, it could mean we're already in recession, masked by rising asset prices courtesy of the Fed.

To give a flavor, the official inflation rate since Covid has been around 21%. But fast food menu prices -- a go-to indicator for Foreign exchange investors -- are up between 35% and 50%. People posting grocery receipts online say it's actually more than 50%.

The problem is if inflation was actually, say, 35% it means GDP hasn't gone up at all since pre-Covid. It means it actually went down. Implying we've been in recession for nearly 5 years.