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Comment by narrator | Hacker News Reader

Shadowstats is a private firm that sells its own calculations of economic statistics :

http://www.shadowstats.com/alternate_data/unemployment-chart...

According to them, unemployment is about 23%.

If you believe Shadowstats' figures, the US economy has been in a recession since 1988.[1] Even more hilariously, the price for a subscription to Shadowstats hasn't increased in the last 8 years of 'hyperinflation'.[2]

I wish people would realize they're a complete joke.

Some other fun quotes from the brain trust behind Shadowstats;

> (Feb 22, 2012) Gold to $8,890, Silver to $517 says John Williams of Shadowstats

When this prediction was made, Gold was at $1,775/ounce and Silver was at $34/ounce. 2.5 years later, Gold is down to $1,286 and Sliver is at $19.50. While Williams was very, very long, the price declined between 30% and 40%.

> (Oct 24, 2012) Economist John Williams says the latest round of “open-ended” QE has set the table for a global “dollar sell-off” and “hyperinflation” no later than 2014. Williams says, “There’s no way the consumer can fuel the economic recovery, and there is no way we’re going to see one in the near future.” Williams predicts, “The Treasury is going to have funding problems, and that means the deficit gets a lot worse.” [4]

The dollar is up 15% since then, inflation is still nonexistent, and the 2014 deficit is over $500 billion smaller than the 2012 one.

You'd be much better off taking financial advice from the Dogecoin guys.

[1] - http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2014/07/17/t...

[2] - http://pragcap.com/update-theres-still-deflation-in-hyperinf...

[3] - https://www.goldstockbull.com/articles/gold-8890-silver-517-...

[4] - http://usawatchdog.com/dollar-sell-off-and-hyperinflation-by...

Shadowstats is a huge scam site. Their methodology is to to take the official government numbers (unemployment, inflation, whatever) and add an arbitrary constant to it to make the numbers more attractive to right-wingers so that they'll fork over the annual fee to get "the real story."

I'm not exaggerating, that's their entire shtick.

I suspect you're exaggerating at least a tiny bit, since the difference between their unemployment rate and the official figure is not constant: theirs has been trending up over the past 4 years, while the official figures are going down.

As an example, if you look closely at the alternative unemployment chart that rayiner linked to [0] you can see that the shadowstats line (blue) exactly matches the U6 line (grey) down to the very last wiggle. Until 2010, that is, when unemployment started going down and shadowstats needed to keep people shelling out $175 a year.

[0] http://www.shadowstats.com/alternate_data/unemployment-chart...

It looks like they may have added some growing possibly linear function to the unemployment rate instead of a constant starting in 2009. All the better to push their fear mongering agenda/sales tactic I guess.

Actually not correct.

They report inflation and other economic figures using the methods that the government previously used before "moving the goalposts" in order to report more "convenient" numbers.

This blog post gives a good summary of shadowstats's work on CPI. http://azizonomics.com/2013/06/01/the-trouble-with-shadowsta...

Basically, they think (without evidence) that the government has moved the goalposts so they add an arbitrary number to the official number. They specifically do NOT recalculate the CPI based on old methodology; the shadowstats guy admits this in the blog post.

Can't help mentioning this Paul Krugman post from last month, where he points out that annual subscription to shadowstats has remained the same price for the past 8 years. So much for hyperinflation...

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/07/19/always-inflation...

nice summary. I believe the billion prices project has become http://www.pricestats.com/us-series Unfortunately It looks like we are going negative again.

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