Our mainstream media slanderiness: anti-Trump bias plays tricks
We gladly receive and publish this speech by Mariano Bella, director of the Confcommercio Study Center
Zapping
Around eleven in the evening a few days ago, a "journalist" from an Italian all news network announced, without concealing a certain satisfaction – at least so it seemed to me – that US gross product had collapsed in the second quarter by 31.7 per cent. Shortly after midnight, on the same network, a colleague of his, obviously exhausted from a hard day's work, smoked the aforementioned one comma and summarized the change in US GDP in -37 percent. At that point, albeit under the influence of Chardonnay , I quickly calculated the trend. Consequently, I decided to go to sleep in order to avoid the imminent news of the disappearance of the American continent.
Tweet
On Twitter , contrary to custom, he deepened, explaining: “The land of the free market, self-determination, including health, of individualism. Here it is: USA -31.7 percent ". And the data was in a table that also presented the variations for different European countries, all of a much smaller entity. Demonstrating is an art, and doing it with numbers gives authority.
Patience and boredom
Being anti-Trumpian or anti-American – I would say the second more than the first – can also be fine (not me). Being against arithmetic no, in no case. It is worth reiterating that the US data are annualized, that is, the changes in one quarter compared to the previous quarter (short-term changes) are calculated by transforming the exact data into the trend change that would be observed between three quarters if the next three short-term changes were equal to 'last observed (i.e. US GDP would be 31.7 percent lower in the first quarter of 2021 than in the first quarter of 2020, if in the third and fourth quarters of 2020 and in the first quarter of 2021 the economic change were the same as that recorded in the second quarter of the year 2020).
Why serious and pragmatic people like the economists of the Bureau of Economic Analysis are obsessed with such abstruse calculations I cannot say. They probably hate the idea of cyclical variation and feel the duty to transform it, always and in any case, into a trend metric. We can pray for them to repent, but not cheat on the numbers.
Results and rankings
In any case, it must be recognized and accepted that only two comparisons can be made correctly: all the data calculated in the European style or all the data calculated in the American style. In the first case we have (cyclical percentage changes): second quarter 2020 USA -9.1 per cent, Italy -12.8, euro area -12.1, after a first quarter respectively equal to -1.3 per cent for the USA against -5.5 for Italy and -3.6 for the euro area. In the second case, in the American style, for the second quarter of 2020, the US is -31.7 percent, Italy -42.2 and the euro area -40.3, again after a much more negative first quarter of 2020 in Italy and in Europe compared to America. For the future there is little to foresee: if we return to previous growth rates, the old continent and the very old Italy will recover much later. The same conclusions would be reached using structural parameters such as the elasticity of employment to GDP in the various countries.
Elections
If American public opinion is buying the numbers as they are told in Italy then President Trump has another arrow in his bow. The next data, those relating to the third quarter, will be provided on 29 October (30 in Europe), a few days before the elections. The rebound will be very strong everywhere (although it will not involve a full recovery). With compound capitalization, ie American-style, US growth could be 20-25 percent. If sold well – that is, especially in the right states – it can be worth a lot.
"Journalists" (Italians; of course, not all)
The evening after. Prime time national public network news: "The loss of Italian GDP in the second quarter was 12.8 per cent, a collapse that has not been seen since 1995". I feel self-destructive urges to not think about what I have heard. In Italian, if I still understand it, it would mean that a worse figure than the one just recorded had been observed in 1995 and not later (until today). Even the youngest, perhaps by hearsay, would remember an event of such gravity, if it really happened. But nobody remembers it. Because it did not happen (1995 was a good year, indeed excellent, if compared with more recent periods).
But who can think such a thing? Only those who can think, in fact, that the US GDP could have dropped by more than 30 percentage points in the usual metric. That is, only those who do not even remotely know the size and functioning of modern economies.
But both in the US case and in the case of the "worst Italian figure since 1995", the acquittal must be granted. “Journalists give the news”, so they told me when I was young and I protested the errors they spread. They don't have to verify them or understand their meaning.
So, either out of idiosyncrasy towards English or international statistics, in one case, or, in the other, due to the impossibility of reading the entire Istat press release – which could have already written on the front page "… worst since 1995 , starting year of the quarterly time series ”- we must feel and take what comes. And if we have specific cultural habits and sufficient discernment, we will try to defend ourselves: recognizing, for example, that a fall like that of the second quarter of this year, Italy probably had not experienced it since the second or third quarter of 1944. instead, we have specific knowledge, so we will repeat to our relatives – I remain vague, yes – and to our friends the nonsense that we have been told.
Meanwhile, imaginative and instrumental reconstructions of the Fed's new strategy hit Italian public opinion. We are a defenseless people.
The post The slyness of our mainstream media: anti-Trump prejudice plays tricks on it appeared first on Atlantico Quotidiano .
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Atlantico Quotidiano at the URL http://www.atlanticoquotidiano.it/quotidiano/la-cialtronaggine-dei-nostri-media-mainstream-il-pregiudizio-anti-trump-gioca-brutti-scherzi/ on Thu, 03 Sep 2020 04:08:00 +0000.