CHESSNOID

It seems like I have been writing about the recession and the effects its been having on the economy for a long time now.  Be aware that Bush, Bernanke,  and Paulson have been denying it existed even though it is painfully obvious to us when we go shopping or read the paper:

• Gas passing the $4 mark and closing in on $5 a gallon

• Foreclosure numbers  that seem to be increasing at a phenomenal rate and breaking all records

• Housing values are decreasing dramatically

• People being laid off at companies and government agencies

• Government bailouts of Country Wide, Bear Stearns, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac

• Banks being taken over by the FDIC like IndyMac

• Airlines reducing flights and personnel because of fuel costs

• Lenders and credit card companies are reducing or eliminating credit lines.

July 31 (Bloomberg) – The U.S. economy may have slipped into a recession in the last three months of 2007 as consumer spending slowed more than previously estimated and the housing slump worsened, revised government figures indicated.The world’s largest economy contracted at a 0.2 percent annual pace in the fourth quarter of last year compared with a previously reported 0.6 percent gain, the Commerce Department said today in Washington. Growth for the period from 2005 through 2007 was also trimmed.

The revisions now reinforce measures such as employment and production that already signaled the economy was shrinking. The National Bureau of Economic Research, the Cambridge, Massachusetts-based arbiter of economic cycles, defines a recession as a “significant” decrease in activity over a sustained period of time. The declines would be visible in GDP, payrolls, production, sales and incomes.

“We’re in a recession,” Allen Sinai, chief economist at Decision Economics Inc. in New York, said in a Bloomberg Television interview. “It’s going to widen, it’s going to deepen.”

I am a bit surprised that the actual reports were allowed to come out revised. Funny that they didn’t hold it back from being published and they also made it clear that the previous years were not as good as they said and that the reports were inflated and just now being adjusted. I could understand the previous year, but don’t understand the years before. Seems like it was done on purpose to mislead the American public. Sounds like weapons of mass deception.

Previous Contraction

The prior time the economy shrank was in the third quarter of 2001 during the last recession, when it contracted at a 1.4 percent pace. Growth from January through March was revised down to a 0.9 percent pace from 1 percent. Initial jobless claims increased by 44,000 to 448,000 in the week ended July 26, from a revised 404,000 the prior week, the Labor Department said.

The revisions of growth are part of the government’s annual adjustments to gross domestic product based on additional information from surveys and Internal Revenue Service data.

For 2005, growth was cut to 2.9 percent from 3.1 percent, and the rate of expansion for 2006 was reduced to 2.8 percent from 2.9 percent. The economy grew 2 percent last year, down from a previously reported 2.2 percent.

Nine of the 13 quarters under review were revised down, three increased and one was unchanged.

The largest downward revision was for the last three months of 2007, as the previously reported 2.3 percent gain in consumer spending was reduced by more than half, to 1 percent. Americans cut back on the use of electricity and gas as fuel bills soared.

I wonder who the President was during the recession of 2001?  Could it be the same President from the previously unofficial but now official recession of 2007?