Getting a fair bit of very good feedback on our latest projections as to how the world works that I laid out in Peoplenomics this weekend.  We’ll be doing more on the topic, too: 

Compunism – as I’ve called the phenomena – is what you get when you take a bunch of other “isms” and role them into  a new field of (inadvertent) human behavior.

Close your eyes for a moment and imagine an “anything goes” world where every human event we engage in has suddenly been tainted by the stench of too much computer use, data, dependence, and that most terrible of all facets of Compunism:  Data shopping.

Now, open your eyes.  We’re there!

Everyone is data-shopping and as everyone tries to hedge everything, a huge data-driven feudalism descends upon us.  Un-noticed and almost indescribable to the brainwashed.

OK, to be sure, the government’s Total Information Awareness Program, some of which is no doubt being built into the mix at the Provo computer surveillance fortress / surveillance computing center, will be done right…

Notwithstanding, though, I for one would donate $5 bucks to put a big sign next to the freeway up there that simply reads “Samaritan.”  People who watch Person of Interest will get it.  Television lets more slip than it might…or, it’s feeding The Resistance.

The humans who don’t get it, are those effing idiots who buy and send unfiltered commercial email/spam to innocents like me.,,.

I was on the receiving end of yet another round of  “Get this super-comfort Bra…” this morning.  And, worse, I was instructed to “Buy this special Valentine’s Day package for Your Man.”

WTF?  Ain’t no ‘phobe, dude, but can we at least do a gender sort on such lists?  Half that list cost was useless.  No man I know would tell his wife what bra to buy… you kidding me?  Talk about low IQ marketers….

Is this where the gender confusion in the world is coming from?  Are too many people being subliminally (and not so subliminally) sold wrong-gender goods by computers that they have become like the legendary crack monkeys at all overdose on blow when there’s so much it? 

How are later apes supposed to act when the computer is ubiquitous and is even now showing up on people’s arms in place of their wristwatches?

There have been some good comments on Compunism from the Peoplenomics side of our thinking and a few references in this site’s discussion pages.

It’s not that computers are here….nothing new about that. 

But, as I explained on the Peoplenomics side (in greater detail), it wasn’t the car that changed the world…it’s the whole system of cars; gas stations, road signs, shopping malls, all a result of the production line and Ford.

What networked computers are doing goes so far beyond this as to be unthinkable – at least by the legacy ape series of wet processors.

The new silicon dry processor thinkers are just ahead and they mean to take our planet from us.

We’ve had a chance  to get high civilization right, but it’s like putting down a poor foundation.  Along come computers are we don’t gracefully deal with change.  We don’t learn from the mistakes of the Vedics, Aztecs, Egyptians. 

This is do-over number what?

Sure makes me want to get out of bed and go bust my balls for another week working…and I imagine you feel about the same…

Speaking of Data-Shopping

A tip of the hat to reader Mario who found this list of business starts, stops, and bankruptcies over at Statistical Brain which goes a long ways toward cutting through the government mumbo-jump (and bullshit) about how the economy is doing.

Of course, what doesn’t show up on there is the on and off book hiring related to government.  Still, the sad (but not MSM headline-making) fast seems to be that new business creation was 77% of 2006 levels in 2014.

Not exactly romping, stomping growth that we’ve all been hearing so much about, but then  again “None Dare Call It Deflation,” huh?

A Real-Life Story of How Compunism Works

Subscriber Michal, as you’ll figure out after reading this post, is in healthcare.  And, after I explained the concept of Compunism and how it works, he was generous enough to share his experiences:

George,
I read this weekend article and I got a headache. But then I realized the headache came about from me being bent over while the system F*cked my head into the headboard.

It reminds me that before I made the mistake of going all in with silver, I was making money on the Compunism of financial information. I would notice that the stock market algo’s would sell a stock when it should have been buying, until the next day when someone corrected the algo, and bought the stock. Algos are responsible for 97% of stock transactions. The algos were responding to computer generated articles from press releases. Many times, the resulting headline would be opposite to what the article said. The algo’s were reading the headlines and not the stories. So, I started to look for articles headlines where there was a contradiction in headline versus story, and would buy or sell according to the story. Ended up making 40% in 2011 and 12. Shows that what the computer generates is more believable than the facts.

As for my current lifetime in alternative care, I see the compunism in health care.

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Oh, oh.  I bet you’re thinking “There goes George on the Brian Williams story…” but you’d be wrong.

That’s just a distant “Who cares?”  CNN says he was there, but his chopper didn’t take an RPG but did catch ground fire.  The NY Times has a different take  Across town, the NY Daily News is now questioning his coverage of hurricane Katrina.

While the Williams story may be boundlessly entertaining (pitting the right and left over what media should, or shouldn’t do, say, act, etc) the story won’t impact where we go next as a country.

Lying is, I hate to break it to you, a well-established policy of government.  Which is my so many documents about historical events – like the Kennedy Assassination  – are still secret.  It’s also why FOI requests get turned down all the time and nowhere is this more apparent than in economics.  The public’s right to know seems government-impeded, and likely for good reason:  People would be pissed and angry if they had all the facts, more’n likely.

The lie changes from day to day.

The big lie du jour I refer to, of course, is what we’ve been telling you for years.  We report the government press release, word for word, but we discount it a bit.  Say 90%, or so.

And it’s not like I’m the Lone Ranger and you’re Tonto in this:  The  Gallup polling organization.reported something extremely interesting earlier this week:

WASHINGTON, D.C. — The U.S. Payroll to Population employment rate (P2P), as measured by Gallup, was 44.1% in January. This is statistically similar to the 44.3% measured in December, but it is the highest measurement of P2P for any January since Gallup began tracking the metric in 2010. January is typically one of the lowest months for P2P in any year.

They go into the other factors a bit, too, including the alternative measures of labor under-utilization and the CES Birth-Death Model which allows bureaucrats to just “make up” numbers as long as they came make statistical justifications for their estimates.

And, of course, what will make this morning’s report even more interesting (in terms of fudging things) is when someone in the MSM gets around to figuring out that it seems highly likely that the employment numbers include 5+ million illegals who have partaken of an illegal (as in not embodied in law passed by Congress) way to snatch up a US work permit.

Seems simple enough to me:  If there aren’t enough people working in the US, you just open the border, hand out work permits to anyone who wants one, and then infer that they are all working because, gosh, why would they need a work permit if they weren’t working?

So in the bigger scheme of life, Brian Williams is likely only a scapegoat for bigger lies in play all around us.  Not the least of which is employment but which extends into other areas as well:  climate, globalism, how big government is (20+ million) and so forth.

So with that as foreplay, let’s go jump in that pool, again, shall we?

Noting, before we jump into the cesspool, that Williams is a distraction because there’s bigger fish.  Not the least of which is that the Federal Reserve notes of today buys just 4.18 CENTS compared to the purchasing power of the Dollar when the bankster coup took place in the fading hours of 1913.

The Grand-Whopper of them all is simple if you want to see it:  Money is not a storehouse of value (leastwise the paper stuff passed as money.).  It’s a tool of the cruel used to manage and rule.  And thems that makes the “money” makes the “rules.”

Expat Bruce, down in the mountains of Ecuador, where he’s waiting for the US to implode, sent me this sobering reminder:

“id you really think we want those laws observed?” said Dr. Ferris. “We want them to be broken. You’d better get it straight that it’s not a bunch of boy scouts you’re up against… We’re after power and we mean it…

“There’s no way to rule innocent men.

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Flying story, user notes on Retrograde and the Big Vitamin Battle on the grill this morning…we’ll start with the fun stuff.

See that funny looking instrument off to the right, there?

That’s called an artificial horizon, attitude indicator, and a bunch of other things in aviation.

The idea is simple enough:  If you are flying an airplane, and the clouds come along with enough density to block out a view of the ground, you need to know where “Up” is.

Your eyes become useless, the inner ear begins lying to you, and what you think is your “sense of balance” turns out to genuinely suck.

Any second, vertigo will ensue if you don’t have one of these…and that will be that.  You’ll either pitch up the nose of the airplane, too far, stall, and come crashing down to the earth. 

The artificial horizon gyro platform (vacuum or electric-powered) keeps that from happening if you can read it and “keep coordinated” under instrument conditions.

Or, you’ll drop the nose down and think that you’re flying straight and level when, if you’d look at any number of instruments, you would be able to see instantly that your nose is down, you are increasing airspeed (the air speed indicator is rising), the altimeter is showing you beginning to burn off altitude, and your vertical speed indicator might be suggesting a speed of something line –1,500 feet per minute.

That’s why pilots (at least good ones), are always aware of their instruments.

“How does this relate to Retrograde?”  you’re wondering.

When you fly an airplane there’s a checklist you go through, so that when you (not IF) you ever goof up and go inadvertently into instrument conditions, you’ll be able to fly the airplane safely using the “instrument scan” technique.

On serious airplanes, the instruments are arrange in a standard T configuration with this goody top and center of the T.  Below is a directional gyro (a gyroscopic compass) and to the left is the air speed while to the right is the altimeter. 

So there I was, picking up the old Beechcrate from the Doctor’s office and we were socked in, Instrument Flight Rules (IFR) and not legal to fly instruments, I did a “high speed taxi” down the runway,  “accidentally” lifted off to about 10-feet of altitude, and then dropped back down into ground effect, floated along a few feet over the runway with 15-degrees of flaps in, until, almost a mile later, I was coming up on the north end of the runway, so I settled back down  onto the main gear, dropped the nose, raised the flaps and was slowed to way under flying speed before the desired turn-off.

I did the “high speed taxi” and “float in ground effect” because of something I figured out:  When an airplane comes out of maintenance is one of the highest likelihood of failures you’ll find.

By keeping the first post-maintenance flight as a “high speed taxi” (where, OK, you might lift off into ground-effect, slow flight) you can check everything and be safely within a few feet of ground which seems to me like a good thing.  When  possible, I do two of these, before going really flying after maintenance, since I’m a natural-born coward.

Back to the Retrograde part.  I noticed in the preflight that my main gyro (attitude indicator) was not erecting properly.  It was slightly wonky in the preflight. 

Since I was going on a “high speed taxi” it was no issue.  I know the airplane like a “second skin” and practicing aborted take-offs is a very good exercise. 

By the time I was down at the far end of the field, the attitude gyro was (finally) erected, but on taxi (regular low speed type) back to our hangar, Jeremy the Mechanic looked into the vacuum pump and announced it healthy.

“Most likely, it’s because it’s so bloody cold out…but this is how gyros give notice that they are planning to go out.  They take too long to spin up in cold weather.”

Conditions were 33-degrees and the airplane was dead cold when this happened, but I concurred with his assessment: Not normal so it’s another squawk that will be addressed.

The mechanic was also impressed with how slow our VG equipped airplane will almost hover in ground effect.  He couldn’t believe how slow it was flying with the nose-high configuration.

Since we were talking about Retrograde the other day, I’m not sure how I’d score this one.

Was this the “going away present” for Mercury going out of Retrograde on the 11th? 

I haven’t figured out how to score this one:  One side of me figures that Mercury just screwed me out of $600-bucks because it will cost around $500 to rebuild the gyro platform and another $100, or so, for the in and out of the airplane…so that was bad in terms of the checkbook.

But, it might actually be “good” in the sense that whenever possible, I like to “trap errors” in tightly controlled conditions, when flying in ground-effect is:  Hitting the ground from 3-feet is a lot different than hitting from 3-thousand, and from ground effect, I can have the aircraft stopped and be out of it in 15-seconds, or so. 

So the bottom line to this was to wonder if Retrograde is really all that dangerous.  After all, if we have great safety habits, maybe Retrograde is just Nature’s way of telling us what we need to be saving money for, next. 

More Adventures in Retrograde…

All this Retrograde talk got reader Kate to wondering about how all this ties in with my recent comments on the “workings of time.,…”

“… the fact of quantum physics that all time exists”

Is this by the same physicists who found the Higgs Bosom and then….. didn’t? I have a hard time believing that we know much of anything (hard facts) about the universe. But we must keep looking…. I suppose. Also, why would Mercury retrograde affect you if all time exists?”

You know, this may see absolutely nuts, but let me roll one out here:

We all know that time-space is deformed by the mass of a planet or other large object, right?  And, since other planets go around influencing the subtle nature of our depression in time-space, is it possible that at a deep-down psychological level, we have time expectations than can be tricked, just like the inner ear can be tricked into losing track of where up is, that we were talking about in gyros?

And, if this is the case, could that really be what the “retrograde effect” is all about – a minute variation in space-time which is so small that we don’t notice it because it impacts the whole planet?

Isn’t it possible that we all have forward-directed expectations which could increase the number of people making missteps right when Mercury runs the wrong way?

Long-time Peoplenomics subscriber Kerry sure noticed the effect:

Mercury in retrograde huh ? I must be right in the window. Just got my water bill last Friday.

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We begin with coffee and context:

Here’s a little factoid you may not know, gleaned from the latest Experiment Aircraft Association magazine:

In July of 1929, Transcontinental Air Transport began to offer coast-to-coast air service.  It had ordered something like ten of the (then new) Ford Trimotor planes.

This was before precision GPS approaches, WAAS GPS, and even VORs.  These were daytime flyers because back then luxuries like runway approach lights (like VASI units) weren’t around, either.

“What could this possibly have to do with economics?” you’re wondering.

Ah…therein lies this morning’s thinking exercise, Grasshopper.

In order to see when we are at the “top” of a market, we really oughta see some new technology come online.  Like the TAT offering in July of that year, we would expect it to be a hybrid of current technologies.

But cool enough, that people would get the idea.  TAT was founded on the idea of flying coast to coast.  Since the airplanes couldn’t fly at night, people flew during the day, trained overnight, and then flew more the next day.

Our modern analog should become visible at some point – and if you have some dart throws (guesses) please feel free to send them along.

Oh, one other thing about TAT:  Their first airplane crash occurred exactly on the same day as the (up until then) all time market high around Dow 386 and change.  As Wikipedia tells is:

“On September 3, 1929 a westbound TAT flight crashed on Mt. Taylor in New Mexico, with loss of all aboard. The Associated Press said it was the first plane crash on a regular commercial land route.

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No, I suppose knowing that my personal experience of life is that I tend to “run ahead” of the actual dates of Mercury in Retrograde (which will officially end February 11th, or so), I shouldn’t be messing about with anything.

I should sit back, make my observations about life and the economy, and simply shut the hell up until we’re back in right place.

But a number of things have occurred this Retrograde which make it pretty interesting.

Case of the Mountain View

You may recall Tuesday when I liked life to a motorcycle ride I’d taken years ago around Mount Rainier up in Washington State.

A reader noticed something sketchy about Tuesday:

Hi George — There must have been some “mountain dew” in the air in TX yesterday.  Look what my friend Don (who has no idea who you are) wrote in his column yesterday from his friend’s house in Austin. 

Best,

Martha from RI

This doesn’t mean one person is right and another wrong, it just means that we all look at life in alternate ways, with each perspective unique. If you stand behind the trunk of a tree and look at the mountain, you’ll see one vantage point. If you go down by the river and check out the same view, you’ll see another. That’s all. Same mountain, different angle.

Then, in a subsequent email, turns out there was also a mountain angle to a comic strip or so such in the Boston area…same morning.

Odd how things cluster…or is it?  Her follow-up:

George — got another one for you…Frank DeMarco (from the Monroe Institute) is working on a new book and is posting his reference sessions online.  He’s interviewing his former psi partner from TMI, now deceased.  Today’s post is ostensibly about good and evil, but mostly it’s about truth being relative to which side of the mountain you’re viewing from.  More abstract than Cerow’s direct quote about a mountain, but the same concept.  And btw, if you want to know the ins & outs of reality creation, Frank’s books are every bit as good as Jane Roberts’ and easier to comprehend. 

http://hologrambooks.com/hologrambooksblog/index.php/2015/02/04/rita-more-on-good-and-evil/

This one may, or may not, be explainable.  If this is the same Frank DeMarco who used to read this column now and then, but no telling if he was by yesterday.

There is a point of learning here:  Does vision/insight/thought-form travel around us due to any number of inputs (like television, radio, music, the internet, books, etc) and just look for somewhere to land?

Frank’s a damn fine writer and thinker…his Amazon page is here. 

Case of the Solid-State Drive

Wouldn’t it be cool if there were particular astrological formations (like Retrograde) where each of us is more particularly  connected to IT? 

It doesn’t work at the hardware level, however.

The short story here is that for some weeks I have been tinkering with getting a new solid-state drive installed on the UrbanSurvival Super Computer.  No, I’m not kidding:  Its four monitors (two Nvidia dual multi-GB HDMI video cards, fast i-7 chipset, 12 GB of memory, an assortment of terabyte drives…this thing scares the hell out of me it’s so fast.

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You may not be too familiar with Project Syndicate, but it’s a non-profit business model designed to get great content out to the world in news ways – ways ignored by conventional (profit model) business models.

I’ve been sort of following their work and here comes this blow-your-socks-off article Monday by one of my favorite economics, Nouriel Roubini.  The whole piece, over here, is worth your time reading because he gets to the core problem we have been talking about for more than a year now:  Consumer Super-Saturation.  Check out this quote:

“Simply put, we live in a world in which there is too much supply and too little demand. The result is persistent disinflationary, if not deflationary, pressure, despite aggressive monetary easing. “

Well, I’ll be damned:  Someone besides old nutter-in-the-woods is saying it.

What’s more, there’s no simply solution.  What’s more, he’s pretty much in line with our skepticism of central banks, government interveners, and cryptocurrencies, too, as he says:

“This assortment of ‘Austrian’ economists, radical monetarists, gold bugs and bitcoin fanatics has repeatedly warned that such a massive increase in global liquidity would lead to hyperinflation, the U.S. dollar’s collapse, sky-high gold prices, and the eventual demise of fiat currencies at the hands of digital cryptocurrency counterparts. “

I remember all the hate-mail to this day.  People were calling me a government stooge, and worse, because I had outlined four possible outcomes to the Bitcoin bubble and yet here we are, almost exactly a year from the failure of Mt. Gox and my article from the period (*here) still seems like a pretty good assessment.

A single Bitcoin this morning is down from the $1200 range where people were calling it the economic savior of freemen and all kinds of other labels a year ago to the sucking wind $240 area.  Yet here we are, a year later, and I am still watching the charts.

Worth repeating:  Bitcoin may, at some future juncture, along with the other cryptos, but for now the problem is we need a good war.

Not that war is good per se:  It’s dirty, messy, lots of people get dead, and all the rest of it.  But short of a massive West Coast Earthquake (in April, say), the odds of fixing this, or any other major world economic mess is pretty thin.

Unless we can bring in a whole bunch of new consumers.  Hmmm…

Making Up Jobs, Importing Consumers

Meantime, a shocking (or not so shocking, depending on your view of the Obama administration) says the government has issued 5.5 million new work permits to foreigners in the US since 2009.

The first line of the Center for Immigration Studies backgrounder outlines what’s been going on this way:

“Government data reveal that more than 5.5 million new work permits were issued to aliens from 2009 to 2014, above and beyond the number of new green card and temporary worker admissions in those years. This is a huge parallel immigrant work authorization system outside the limits set by Congress that inevitably impacts opportunities for U.S. workers, damages the integrity of the immigration system, and encourages illegal immigration.”

Already, the outrage is building with Breitbart headlining it as a “shadow authorization system” which it notes is outside the legal immigration system.

Critics of the Center for Immigration Studies will be quick to point out that it’s an anti-immigration group, but defenders will point to the laws and definition of the word “border” which Barrack and Eric seem to have missed in law school.

The Senate is due to take up defunding of executive amnesty – yet a further example of trying to rein-in the imperial presidency.

Still, there is some logic to the move, however twisted. 

First, and foremost, breaking down the border with Mexico REMAINS part and parcel of the still-underway North America Union movement, because the plan of globalists is a stepping stone approach to government:  First you have cities, then provinces or states, then national governments, then the regional blocks (like the EU, BRICs and the NAU still to come), and then World Government. Stampede them all with a climate scare and roll out the global taxes.,…

If that doesn’t work, Ebola II.

Secondly, however, is that additional humans from South America will stoke up demand for consumer goods here, add some badly needed jobs to the employment report (the next one is due out on Friday) and can be massaged past the liberal media by wrapping it up with pictures of tearful Hispanic families and hot phrases like “broken homes” and “reuniting families.”

The Holder replacement hearings saw exactly the same script by Ms.

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A long time reader (of this and multiple sites) sent in a fine message that deserves wider audience than the small number who received it.  It’s one of those stories that gets to the heart of parables, stories passed on that speak of greater truths.

There was once an old Chinese farmer. One day the old farmers only horse ran away and now he would have no horse to use to haul in his crops. Upon hearing this the villagers came out to see him. They said to the old Chinese farmer, So sorry to hear about your misfortune with your horse running away. The old Chinese farmer replied, “how do you know this is misfortune? The villagers shook their heads and walked away.

7 days later, the old Chinese farmer’s horse returned and with it brought 10 wild horses. Now, pulling in the crops would be even easier and any such loss in the farm suffered would be nothing compared the compensation received from selling the horses the old farmer sold. Upon hearing this the villagers came out to the old farmers and said, “you were right! Your horse running away was not misfortune!

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Oh, sure, the market will make one final little bounce at the open this morning.

The half-time show wasn’t ruined with a terrorism attack, the game was played like any other, but the one residual problem is called the Super Bowl Indicator.

Here’s how it works:

If the AFC wins, the Super Bowl Indicator claims the market will decline.  Since the Patriots were the winners of the AFC North (and won) while the Seahawks were NFC West, the market should decline markedly in short order.

Thankfully, I’m not the lone nutter on this:  the observation is backed up by an Investopedia entry.

The Investopedia entry is worth study because they claim the indicator has only about an 80% accuracy which is far less than my own 100% accuracy, lol.

So stand by for the stuff to hit the fan — Just not right away – as in this morning.

Still, given that the market is getting dangerously close to the 200 day moving average and the collapse in a heap last Friday…

I’ll check with Robin Landry to see how the monthly MACD closed, but I’m guessing it cross down.  But already my friend Roger Reynolds has checked in with this:

Do you know many certified financial planners??? IF so, ask them “IF” they follow the old FABIAN mutual fund switching system.—–That is, as long as the dow stays above it’s 200 day average——red line at stockcharts.com, then stay fully invested in stock mutual funds. “IF” the dow goes below the 200 day average(red line) then sell stock funds and go to cash.

In my opinion, they sold in October, but the fed goosed the market back up and they bought back pushing the averages to new highs. Now, the dow has fallen and is only about 100 points above that RED LINE. Will the dow fall and especially close below that red line??? WATCH CAREFULLY!!!! “IF” the dow closes below the red line, then the mutual fund switchers should once again sell everything.—-Consider, this is the way markets are supposed to top out—–volatility.

Of course, you can skip the Stanford MBA and the doctorate at the London School of Economics and just watch the Super Bowl.

Patriots of the AFC says it all.

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We begin today’s economics discussion with a bit of art history.

Specifically, with a picture of Christopher Columbus arguing his crazy “round the world” idea to the Council of Salamanca, a 1400’s intellectual group in Spain, from which the name is drawn.

The painting was done by Emanuel Leutze who almost no one has heard of, but everyone has probably seen his painting of Washington crossing the Potomac…

This has what, exactly, to do with the market?

Ah…to the point. 

The Council of Salamanca was a kind of intellectual arbitration group.  Things were proposed to the group and voted as fact or fiction and the King and Queen of Spain (usually) took their advice.

So that’s what the Council was.

In the modern world, we have similar such councils, groups, commissions and the like – and all with pretty much the same purpose:  The vote on “what’s real.”

Having written about the Greater Depression that we’re now in for 18 years now, I feel a bit like Columbus at times; arguing rational and science before a herd of sheep.  Occasionally, there will be some head-nodding, but that could just be the herd grazing.

Nevertheless we stand at a very important “do or die” day for the market today.

A major decline (such as the one hinted at by the futures) will indicate the next big leg of the decline could be getting underway.

Regrettably, the line in the sand by my friend Robin Landry’s work is 1990 to 1991 on the S&P 500 index.  In our Trading Model that Peoplenomics readers follow, we have a terribly interesting counterpoint:  Our Global Index has just broken to marginal new highs as of mid-week, compared with 2007’s peaking process, but if global markets drop back enough from Wednesday levels, then it will be a massive double top formation – of the sort spanning 7+ years.

At the larger zoom-out, we could see the declines since 2007 being replayed in short order.  There continues to be a viewpoint (mine) that when the Internet Bubble popped in 2001 (and between 5 and 7 trillion in values blew up) that was really the start of the Greater Depression.

Unlike the 1930’s event, we went promptly to war (albeit with the wrong country and on made-up intel) and the Fed lit off the largest housing bubble ever.  And all they had to do was fall in love with no doc loans and make M3 disappear and no one would notice.

I mean besides this nutjob in the woods.

While it is true that the stock market has more than recovered from the 11723 Dow peak in the spring of 2000, we have to take inflation into account.  Using the Minneapolis Fed calculator, the Dow would only need to beat 16,080 in 2014 to be at technical new highs, even on an “inflation adjusted basis.”

But is this really true?

Perhaps.

The US GDP in 2000 was 10.28 trillion. And this morning we get a fresh report on GDP to look at:

“Real gross domestic product — the value of the production of goods and services in the United States, adjusted for price changes — increased at an annual rate of 2.6 percent in the fourth quarter of 2014, according to the “advance” estimate released by the Bureau of Economic Analysis. In the third quarter, real GDP increased 5.0 percent.

The Bureau emphasized that the fourth-quarter advance estimate released today is based on source data that are incomplete or subject to further revision by the source agency (see the box on page 4 and “Comparisons of Revisions to GDP” on page 5). The “second” estimate for the fourth quarter, based on more complete data, will be released on February 27, 2015.

The increase in real GDP in the fourth quarter reflected positive contributions from personal consumption expenditures (PCE), private inventory investment, exports, nonresidential fixed investment, state and local government spending, and residential fixed investment that were partly offset by a negative contribution from federal government spending. Imports, which are a subtraction in the calculation of GDP, increased.

The deceleration in real GDP growth in the fourth quarter primarily reflected an upturn in imports, a downturn in federal government spending, and decelerations in nonresidential fixed investment and in exports that were partly offset by an upturn in private inventory investment and an acceleration in PCE.

The price index for gross domestic purchases, which measures prices paid by U.S. residents, decreased 0.3 percent in the fourth quarter, in contrast to an increase of 1.4 percent in the third.

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