Читать книгу Building Wealth with Silver - Thomas Herold - Страница 11

No gross domestic product (GDP) figures have been published since 2008. In basic terms, GDP is defined as a measure of a country's overall economic output. It is the market value of all final goods and services made within the borders of a country in a year.

This clearly illustrates the problem when you compare it to the GDP of the U.S. which was $14 trillion in 2008. Just to let you know how significant this number is, it includes the associated healthcare costs of all sick people in the U.S. as well.

This figure alone does not distinguish whether or not a product or service is sustainable or contributes to wealth. For example: every single cent for war counts toward productivity factored into the GDP. So the real number, a healthy number not involving real contributing productivity would be far less than the reported $14 trillion.

What that illustrates is that the GDP is, in effect, not only inflated by some indeterminate amount due to the inclusion of nonproductive economic factors, the dollar is weaker in real terms than everyone would like to believe. Pointing to a $14 trillion GDP as a sign of inherent strength becomes meaningless in real world terms, particularly when economic crises are brewing in all economies around the world.

While there is not much you can hope to achieve as an individual on these macro-economic scales, there is one thing you can do as an individual to help protect your money and even profit from it during these times: get yourself a good financial education that clearly helps you put the historic process into perspective so you can make good financial decisions today and tomorrow.