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The efforts by the U.S. propaganda-machine to pump-up U.S. equity markets this year have been nothing short of comical.

It started off with bold predictions that the Obama “stimulus” package would rescue the U.S. economy. Then the propaganda-machine had to immediately “forget”their own prediction – so that they could act suitably “surprised” when U.S. economic numbers became slightly less-terrible a couple of months later.

This, in turn, caused U.S. “consumer confidence” to turn higher. Once that happened, the propaganda-machine has since been using this renewed “confidence” as a 'reason' why markets should continue to go higher.

There are several observations to make about this extremely dubious “statistic”. First of all, there has been no indication of “confidence”. Even in the May reading, when the propaganda-machine was crowing about how “confident” Americans were, the percent of Americans who thought business conditions were “good” was less than 9%, while the percentage who thought business conditions were “bad” was nearly 45%.

In short, it was plainly a lie to suggest that Americans were becoming more confident. All that had happened is that months of propaganda had made them slightly less pessimistic.

The second observation to make is that surveys of this type have huge margins of error. Thus, any/all small changes have no statistical relevance because when a reported change is smaller than the margin of error the people compiling the data know that they cannot put any faith in such increments. This means that there was no improvement in “consumer confidence” in any statistical sense – because given the margin of error, confidence could actually have deteriorated in those months, except the survey isn't “sensitive” (i.e. accurate) enough to detect it.

Similarly, the decline in U.S. “consumer confidence” in June was so small as to also be statistically insignificant. However, with the propaganda-machine choosing to pump small, upward ticks as “improved” confidence, they have no choice but to report equally small increments in the opposite direction as “declines”.

Given that the measurable changes are primarily the result of brainwashing, and the small, monthly increments actually have no statistical validity at all, it is nothing short of perverse to describe this statistic as “consumer confidence”. A much more accurately descriptive label would be to call this the “consumer gullibility” index – as what is really being measured is how well government propaganda is succeeding in deceiving Americans into believing that conditions are improving.

As further evidence of this all-out propaganda-campaign, there is the sell-out of formerly respected economist, Robert Shiller – in a recent Bloomberg interview. Shiller is one half of the team which compiles the Case-Shiller index of U.S. housing prices. This has been the only reliable measurement of declines in U.S. house prices.

The only other alternatives in the market are price data compiled by U.S. realtors, themselves (hardly an objective group). Then there is the ridiculous propaganda produced by the U.S. government. At a time when the Case-Shiller index was showing U.S. house prices plummeting by an all-time record, 19%/year, U.S. government numbers claimed that U.S. house prices were increasing.

Now, even Robert Shiller has simply become Robert-shill. In his Bloomberg interview, Shiller unequivocally stated, “At this point people are thinking the fall is over.” Shiller reached this totally absurd conclusion (see “The Distressing news about Distressed U.S. properties”) on the basis of one month of data.