If you do not like the ecocomic numbers adjust them.

By now everyone is familiar with the concept of "seasonally adjusted" numbers in employment, sales or economic performance. Some of this is justified: we know that students flood the job market in June and leave in September, or that there is a surge in retail activity at the end of the year. But, the urge to make things appear better has spawned some treatments that are simply counter intuitive and let's just say it - not factual. Take the employment numbers: unemployment is dropping because people leave the work force. Forty percent of the unemployed have even given up looking for a job.

Then there was the GDP number for Q1, 2015, only a 0.2% growth. That certainly does not agree with the image projected by the Media. So, another adjustment was invented, the RESIDUAL SEASONALITY. This treatment raised the GDP (now called GDP PLUS) to 1.8%

Another quantity bragged about is the Payroll number. On closer inspection mthe increase in payroll number is due to an increase in part time jobs as businesses convert full time positions to part time positions to save on cost of Obamacare.

You will not be surprised that business is also "adjusting" the numbers to make them look better (or not as bad). Now that the increased value of the Dollar is biting into exports, business has invented a quantity called RESIDUAL CURRENCY TRANSLATION to blame a drop in sales on currency changes.

The US and Europe can not grow economically because of deflation. There are 3 causes of deflation: 1. Zero Interest Rate (ZIRP) wipes out a whole bunch of income that people used to earn by loaning money to credit worthy individuals; 2. income handed to people for doing no work produces no increase in the economy and 3. keeping precious metals artificially suppressed camouflages the inflationary effect of money printing. If the govt could grow the economy by handing people money for not doing work was a viable way of growth, we should see evidence of it. We do not, so the govt is trying to fake up some numbers. This will not end well.