Signs You are Not an Economist

A good economist is not like a weatherman. A good economist makes good predictions. One sign you are more like a weatherman than an economist is when you blame the weather for the bad economic situation, like <a href="http://finance.yahoo.com/news/cold-weather-seen-temporarily-slowing-051130436.html">this typical mainstream economist.

Mainstream economists lean left, just like the mainstream media does. Their numbers favor the government. Their numbers sometimes seem credible because they site government agencies and, less often, university studies. Unfortunately, these institutions also lean left.

The Reuters economist argues that the effects of the recovery cannot be seen on account of the weather. It is the weather which caused our .1% GDP growth over the last quarter in the US, he says.

Allow me to offer a simpler explanation. There is no recovery, and that fact has little to do with the weather. The advent of unprecedented Federal money creation since the 2000s created and has sustained an economic downturn, exacerbated by the moral hazards of bailouts, the problems of stimulus, selective government lending, poor regulation, and so on.

Look for back-revisions in the future which will reveal that the correct number is even lower than .1%. I believe it is negative, but good luck getting a government agency to admit such a thing.

For the record, weather does matter, especially in the short run, but dude. Not that much.