The banking crisis in America continues to grow. The interest rate policies of the Federal Reserve, which has been implemented for more than a year, continue to cause problems primarily for banks and other institutions.
At the meeting held on May 3, 2023, the FED had increased interest rates by 25 bps in line with expectations. Markets did not react positively or negatively to this. On May 5, 2023, the Non-Farm Employment data was announced as 253,000 (253,000). This is actually a good indicator for the American economy because market experts think that the American economy will enter a recession, but this data is of the opposite opinion. In short, the more jobs people can find, the better off companies seem to be doing. But this is not exactly so.
The HILL company, in a letter released on May 5, announced that the US Labor Department revised its February employment data to 248,000 from the normally announced 326,000, and March employment data to 165,000 from 236,000. It is understood from here that these data from America are not the same as the values that are announced instantly and they correct this later. The employment data in May was announced as 253,000, and this value obviously does not reflect the truth. The reason for this data fallacy was that if the numbers were corrected, the markets would react very sharply to the downside. Because they want to prevent this, they publish the data differently. Of course, these data falsifications are not the first and will not be the last.
You can find the related news here.
Inflation
The United States switched to a new inflation calculation system in the 1980s. In the graphs below, we can see the difference between the inflation calculated by the new system and the actual inflation.
You can reach the official data site shared with the graphics here.
GDP Annual Growth
This is the graph comparing the growth data shared by the US government and the actual growth data.
(Red is growth data shared by the US government / Blue is actual growth data.)
You can reach the official data site shared with the graph here.
Employment Rate
Another problem with the accuracy of unemployment figures is related to information received from companies. Although the companies seem to be hiring workers and providing employment, we can see in these graphs that this is not the case. While the number of companies seeking employment decreased before the 2020 crisis, layoffs continued to increase, and after a while, they reached an incredible ceiling. We can see from the graph that the same situation is happening now.
Manufacturing PMI
Another data that shows us that these problems are not or will not be limited to the USA is the China Manufacturing data. Below you can see the “manufacturing” data for the USA and China. When this data fell below a certain value, there were great economic problems. Some years experienced economic crisis, some years economic stagnation and some years experienced very difficult times called economic depression.
You can find the US and China Manufacturing Data here.
As a result of all these data and news, we can understand that America wants to delay some situations and does not want to publish some data. However, to be realistic, both America and the world are not going through good times economically and it seems that it will not pass for a long time.
