(Today’s Banking Humor!)… Hookers And Blow: How Changing The Definition Of GDP Officially Jumped The Shark
by Tyler Durden
ZeroHedge.com
05/22/2014
A year ago it was the US which first “boosted” America’s GDP by $500 billion – literally out of thin air – when it arbitrarily decided to include “intangibles” to the components that ‘make up’ GDP (in the process cutting over 5% from the US Debt/GDP ratio). Then Spain joined the fray. Then Greece. Then the UK. Then Nigeria, which showed those deveoped Keynesian basket cases how it is really done, when it doubled the size of its GDP overnight when it decided to change the base year of its GDP calculations. Now it is Italy’s turn, and like everything else Italy does, this latest “revision” of the definition of GDP easily wins in the style points category. As Bloomberg reports, “Italy will include prostitution and illegal drug sales in the gross domestic product calculation this year.” Yup: blow and hookers. And that, ladies and gents, how it’s done.
The Rest…HERE
