http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Global_Economy/IK09Dj02.html-snip-
Rex Nutting of the Economic Report explains that there is no reason for Vicious Mogambo Vengeance (VMV), but that in pure Orwellian bizarro gibberish, "Inflation was low because oil prices surged," which he says can be explained by noting that "In GDP math, sometimes one plus one equals zero."
At first, I thought that he was insulting me by expecting me to believe such stupidity - that price inflation would fall because oil went up in price, but he holds up the actual news article from MarketWatch.com, which confirms that "As odd as it sounds, the government reported that inflation was at a four-decade low in the third quarter, primarily because import oil prices rose so much."
And sure enough, there is the actual sentence, "If you don't understand that, welcome to the confusing world of national income accounting, where up sometimes is down, and where sometimes one plus one can equal zero."
I am suddenly very scared and very confused, and Mr Nutting sees me reflexively reaching under my jacket for one of the pistols I have tucked in there just for emergencies like this, and quickly assures me that there is no reason for taking any extreme action or discharging any weapons, but that it is all so easily explainable by Shelley Smith, who's in charge of figuring the price index for the government's Bureau of Economic Analysis, who said sometimes the mechanical formula produces some "quirky, nonintuititive relationships".
"Most of the time," it is explained, "the government's formula doesn't produce any weird numbers, because the mathematical quirks all cancel each other out. But in the just concluded third quarter, it did produce quirky numbers that don't accurately reflect reality, even though they are correct from an accounting point of view."
-snip-
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and then Rex smirked
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