Beware of Good News That Puts Lipstick on a Hillary
By David Haggith
TheGreatRecession.info
July 15, 2016
… or hair coloring on Donald Trump. Neither one helps.
Do you scratch your head as I do, when you read one story in the news that says retail sales grew in June and then read another that says retail sales sucked like a drain hole? Often things are not what they seem.
Sales may have improved from one month to another only because they fell into a cess pool the previous month, which stank so bad nothing can compare … or because we just entered a month when things always pick up, yet this year they picked up less than in previous years (making it a bad month as things generally go) … or because one story is giving month-to-month data, while another focuses on the more telling year-to-year data.
Today, for example, NewsMax, a fairly balanced place to find economic and financial news, carried a headline that read, “Retail Sales, Industrial Output Data Buoy Economic Outlook.” The article gave the following report:
U.S. retail sales rose more than expected in June as Americans bought motor vehicles and a variety of other goods, reinforcing views that economic growth picked up in the second quarter. The outlook was further supported by other data on Friday showing that industrial production recorded its biggest increase in 11 months in June on strong manufacturing and utilities output.
That is the story as it will also most likely reverberate throughout the mainstream media, but might the key words be that retail sales rose “more than expected?.” Maybe expectations were so dismal they weren’t hard to beat. And how strong was that June industrial output?
Does the story tell the more important story regarding the same data?
The Rest…HERE
