Media and government officials keep telling us the economy looks great, but a peek behind the curtain tells a different story.

White-House-GDP-2

Some people do see the writing on the wall. Peter Schiff has been saying the US may well have already entered a recession. Last month, Jim Grant echoed Peter, saying the US economy likely went into recession in December 2015. And in a recent interview, Rogers Holdings Chairman Jim Rogers said there is a 100% probability the US will be in a downturn within a year:

It’s been seven years, eight years since we had the last recession in the US, and normally, historically we have them every four to seven years for whatever reason—at least we always have. It doesn’t have to happen in four to seven years, but look at the debt, the debt is staggering.”

The debt is indeed staggering, and that’s not the only sign of trouble on the horizon. But by and large, the mainstream just doesn’t get it. Last week, the government  revised GDP growth up to 1.0% for the fourth quarter of 2015. It was at 2.0% in Q3. That led to extensive cheerleading.

But once again, mainstream analysts put on rose-colored glasses and it’s blinded them to reality. Digging just beneath the surface, we find a lot of reasons to be less optimistic about future economic prospects.

As economist Bob Murphy pointed out, the GDP numbers aren’t good at all when you put them in context:

Yes, this new estimate of 1.0% real growth in 4q 2015 is better than the original estimate of 0.7% growth, but it is still half of the 3rd quarter growth. For those who rely on these numbers, why are we supposed to be happy that the annualized growth rate fell in half from 3rd to 4th quarter 2015?…Even according to the White House’s own chart (posted above), we can see that the recent announcement is hardly grounds for breaking out the champagne. In the chart above, we added everything in red. Look at how the quarterly 2015 growth figures compare to 2007. Why is all of this good news?”

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