Your are not alone!

How many times in the last twelve months have you been told your country's economy has a poor investment return, you have a growing current account deficit, and your savings record is 'pathetic'!

How often recently have your central bankers, your investment advisors, your Treasury, and of course, your politicians lectured you on how you should change your habits?

How many times have these media-labelled experts told you that your country faces a perilous economic future unless you cut back on your spending now! And you were repeatedly told this was just a problem in our country.

Good news for you! The USA has the same problem as the rest of the western world (WW), and the WW thinks it is a giant problem!

The fundmental question is: Are we measuring the right aspects of our individual economies?

Let us take the USA situation.
"...what if we told you that the doomsayers, while not definitively wrong, aren't seeing the whole picture? What if we told you that businesses are investing about $1 trillion a year more than the official numbers show? Or that the savings rate, far from being negative, is actually positive? Or, for that matter, that our deficit with the rest of the world is much smaller than advertised, and that gross domestic product may be growing faster than the latest gloomy numbers show?..."

BusinnessWeek Online further reports that:"The statistical wizards at the Bureau of Economic Analysis in Washington can whip up a spreadsheet showing how much the railroads spend on furniture ($39 million in 2004, to be exact). But they have no way of tracking the billions of dollars companies spend each year on innovation and product design, brand-building, employee training, or any of the other intangible investments required to compete in today's global economy. That means that the resources put into creating such world-beating innovations as the anticancer drug Avastin, inhaled insulin, Starbuck's (SBUX ), exchange-traded funds, and yes, even the iPod, don't show up in the official numbers."

Need we say more?

BusinnessWeek Online
Why The Economy Is A Lot Stronger Than You Think