[TropicCat]

Brian,

We all know what has to happen to the USD. At this point, there's no other way out of this mess. China sees it coming and is bailing early yet having said this, knowing what's coming doesn't tell us when it's going to happen.

I don't know who wrote that post you're citing, but if this news were true the USD would have collapsed already as you simply can't hide 38% discounts in trades.

Statistics are sometimes duly reported but intentionally misinterpreted. For instance, there's some pretty good data on income stratification in the United States. Economists Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez have made careers of studying US income inequality using IRS data, which goes back to 1913. The most recent data available (for 2007) showed that the top 1% of US households received 23.5% of all income (the second highest on record, after 1928), while the top 10% received 49.7% of income (the highest on record).

The top .01% earners, 14,988 fortunate folks, had an average income in 2007 of $35,042,705. They had an average federal tax burden, according to Piketty and Saez, of 34.7%, leaving them after tax income of $22.9 million. If you assume a 50% savings rate among this group, you get total savings of $171.5 billion. This is nearly ONE HALF of the total savings for the entire country implied by a savings rate of 4.2% ($365 bn) reported in this month’s Bureau of Economic Analysis data.

The average Joe is struggling to meet his mortgage payment, health care bill and buy groceries yet the news media happily reports that our Joe is saving tons of cash. It's simply not true and is just more 'happy talk' to convince us the bottom of this recession has been reached. What puzzles me is I can't figure out what the benefit is in misinterpreting the data.

It is what it is..