Consumer Metrics Institute: Recovery is a Sham

"The Consumer Metrics Institute is generally a pretty subdued bunch, as befits their job interpreting economic statistics for money managers and other economists. But lately they’ve been sounding, well, apocalyptic. Here are a few snippets from their analysis of the US GDP revision released this morning:
On the government’s questionable use of inflation to arrive at real GDP:

For this set of revisions the BEA assumed annualized net aggregate inflation of 1.26%. In contrast, during the first quarter (i.e., from December to March) the seasonally adjusted CPI-U index published by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) rose by 2.10% (annualized), and the price index published by the Billion Prices Project (BPP) rose at an annualized rate of 5.35%. As a reminder: an understatement of assumed inflation increases the reported headline number — and in this case the BEA’s relatively low “deflater” boosted the published headline rate. If the CPI-U had been used to convert the “nominal” GDP numbers into “real” numbers, the reported headline growth rate would have been a much more modest 0.96%. And if the BPP index (which arguably best reflects the experiences of the American consumer) had be used as the “deflater,” the economy would have been reported to have been contracting at a -2.30% annualized rate.

On falling US imports:

But once again that bad news was more than completely offset by an even larger drop in imports — which now added +0.06% to the headline number after removing -0.32% in the prior report. Since this mathematical “addition” to the headline number can be the consequence of decreasing domestic demand for foreign goods, it is arguably a sign of a weakening economy. It may also be merely a sign of softening commodity prices.

And the big one, plunging incomes:

And as mentioned above, real per-capita disposable income took another hit: it is now reported to have dropped by an annualized $796 from quarter to quarter. Real per-capita disposable income is now down $209 annually from 1Q-2011 — a full two years ago..."

at  http://dollarcollapse.com/the-economy/consumer-metrics-institute-recovery-is-a-sham/