Up up and away!
As I hear more and more about this economic crisis, the pundits and politicians’ voice begin to merge and it becomes a sort of white noise. There isn’t much sense to be made out of most the reports, so as a statistician I prefer to look at data and see what the real story is. Data sometimes lies, but to be frank it lies a lot less than politicians and businessmen scrambling to keep their jobs. I went to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) website for some graphic interpretations of various economic data. As I had said back in March, the United States is in a recession, perhaps the worst in a very long time. But what does the data say about this? Inflation is currently at 3.7%, not much different from last year. The unemployment rate (6.7%) increases every month, but we’re still nowhere near where we were in 1982 when the rate was around 10 percent. What really worries me is not the labor indicators, it’s the monetary indicators. Check out the latest data and you will see what worries me.
