this guy is usually quite accurate;

Oh Look! More Horsecrap (GDP)

[Comments enabled] This morning the GDP for 2Q was released and it "showed" that the economy has reached a $20 trillion annual run-rate in the United States.
Tout TV was up saying this was (of course) a first (actually it wasn't; last quarter we had breached it too) and a large increase over the last 10 years.
Well, of course it was a large increase.
There's only one problem: Exactly zero of it was actual economic expansion.
Yes, I said zero.  In fact the economy has contracted over the last 10 years.
What, you say?  That's impossible -- look at the numbers!
I did look at the numbers and you did not.
Remember that GDP is C + G + I + (net) Ex
In other words, Consumption + Government Spend + Investment + net Exports (Exports - Imports) = GDP.  That's first-semester economics.
All unbacked borrowing by government is, of course, part of "G", and once that's in the economy it never leaves -- unless of course government debt goes down (which it hasn't even during Clinton's alleged "surplus", because that "surplus" never actually existed.)
It therefore circulates forevermore in every future quarter, but by emitting that debt you devalue all existing dollars!  This means that mathematically GDP "in dollars" will mathematically increase by exactly that amount but that says nothing about whether the actual quantity of goods and services increased.
If you have a certain amount of goods and services produced and double the amount of circulating "moneyness" in the economy then the price level on average doubles, since by definition all goods and services consumed were purchased with something -- and that something in the US is denominated in dollars.  In other words you will report that "GDP" has "doubled" even though the amount of goods and services produced has not expanded at all.
So here's the ugly -- Here is US Government debt, to the penny, as of 7/25/2008:

07/25/2008

9,540,689,536,562.79

That is, $9.541 trillion dollars.
Here it is on 7/25/2018:

07/25/2018

21,265,465,085,278.12

$21.265 trillion dollars, or $11.72 trillion more.
The current annual run-rate of the economy is $20.402 trillion.  In 2008, Quarter 2, it was $14.805 trillion, or an actual increase of $5.60 trillion per year from then to today -- in nominal, that is, "dollar-denominated" terms.
Federal government debt added alone was more than double the net increase in nominal GDP over that same period.
In other words the facts are that the economy has actually contracted, not expanded.  That's why the common American is finding food more expensive, fuel more expensive, health care and housing more expensive, cars are more expensive etc etc etc when one looks at the number of hours of effort required to pay for each of such things, that is, in an actual "SI" (or invariant) unit.
The so-called "expansion" since the crash has all been sleight-of-hand -- and continues to this day.  Nor is this new; it was in fact going on for a good long time (decades) prior to 2008 as well.
Goebbels had nothing on our so-called "modern media", say much less our current President and the only reason they get away with this crap is that you can't make change for a $20 without using a computer.

 https://market-ticker.org/akcs-www?post=233872