It’s Ugly if You Look Under the Hood
My plan for today was to write a very basic piece hitched to the one written yesterday “the money has to go somewhere”. The plan was to point out that gold (and silver) will be the final destination for monies dislodged from crashing markets all over the world. Along came the Q1 figures for U.S. GDP, a disaster on many levels. So switching gears, let’s look at the first quarter, how quickly the economy has deteriorated and what it means in the future and in relation to the past. I do plan to tie this together at the end because no matter how you look at it, gold is a magnet for what will be shaken loose.
Q1 GDP came in at .2% growth, this was a whopping $6 billion worth of growth for the quarter.
This number was an obvious disappointment as estimates were around
1%+. Of course the apologists were immediately out in full force to
remind us of how terrible the winter was and “weather” was to blame. I
would ask, isn’t that what “seasonal adjustments” are for? Steve
Liesman of CNBC even posed the question why seasonal adjustments are
“not working”. The obvious answer is because you can only stretch,
massage and outright lie about economic numbers so far before you cannot
any longer …because even the blind will see it.
Breaking
the quarter down and looking under the hood, were it not for the
biggest inventory build of any quarter in history, the quarter would
have shown a negative 2.6% growth rate .
What exactly does this mean? It means the consumer or final user has
shut off their purchases. It means “stuff” was produced but