IS it too much to ask that when presumably educated and intelligent people express a viewpoint, that it be validated with facts and data? Is it too much to ask that “facts and data” be analyzed in context where apples are actually compared to apples?
We live in an era where we essentially must start with the premise that whatever we are told is “fake news” of one sort or another. If you are not initially skeptical, then it probably means you are hearing exactly what you want to hear, regardless if it makes sense. Being intellectually lazy is now the standard, with most people having a dazed mind like a regular customer of a 1930s opium den.
There’s an exceptionally low level of what qualifies as “truth” today. Challenging official numbers on anything and everything is acceptable… no… it is an obligation. But you have an intellectual responsibility to provide an alternative based on an analysis that goes beyond allegations that “the government lies.” Of course, governments lie. But by how much? Ten percent? Twenty percent? Five hundred percent?
Government, business, and people do not tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. But it is important to quantify and justify the “lying” numbers for two reasons. The first is that politically driven agendas are in themselves “lies.” “Your politician always lies; mine always tells the truth.” That is the basic mindset of the person who says that government lies, without offering a reasonable alternative to the lies.
Chinese government economic data has been false, is false, and will continue to be untrue. It is all a bunch of lies. Case closed.
But here is the quantitative and therefore intellectually responsible analysis. Between 1997 and 2000, official figures reported that Chinese real GDP grew 24.7 percent, yet energy consumption decreased 12.8 percent. Energy consumption data was based on looking at the actual output of individual power plants in China. It is easy to fake the top line numbers and extremely hard to change all the internals.
Unless China was running its factories on cow farts—more than 50 percent of its economy then—the GDP data is not true. China just reported its exports to the US increased by 46 percent year-on-year. Except the US reported its imports-from-China data and it is 20 percent lower than what China said it exported.
Equally bogus are the unemployment and inflation numbers in the US. It is as if the US government picks a number that they want and “finds” the data to prove that number. The official annual inflation rate is 1.2 percent ending October 2020. But calculated the same way as it was in 1990, it is 5 percent. Using the 1994 computation method for unemployment, the rate is 26 percent, not the official 6.7 percent.
The second reason it is important to quantify and justify the “lying” numbers is this. “For every 50 grams of cinnamon and 25 grams of ground paprika, the FDA allows up 10 rodent hairs. And in cinnamon, up to 400 insect fragments are allowed per 50-gram sample.”
If you tell me that government is lying about the number of rodent hairs in my cinnamon, there is an important difference between 10 and 1,000 extra hairs. Be intellectually honest and challenge others to do the same. Otherwise, they are just as bad as the liars.
E-mail me at mangun@gmail.com. Visit my web site at www.mangunonmarkets.com. Follow me on Twitter @mangunonmarkets. PSE stock-market information and technical analysis tools provided by the COL Financial Group Inc.