Charts and graphs don't explain the economy. Most of the charts and graphs are either meaningless or designed to confuse you.

The stock market is another technique based exclusively on trickle-down economics used by the wealthy to separate the middle class from its savings.

So-called "free trade" doesn't exist. It is basically a marketing term to distract the unknowing from reality. Trade is controlled by the largest corporations for their own power and profit. So-called "free trade" agreements are the major corporations' method of carving up a captive market so as to increase their profits and prevent competition.

Consider "trade agreements" such as NAFTA and the proposed TPP as the manufacturing equivalent of OPEC.

The Federal Reserve is controlled by the largest banks for their own benefit exclusively. Interest rates are low only on depositors savings. Interest rates are high on credit card balances, student loans, and other money owed to the banks by the middle class.

Corporate avoidance of taxes, such as through unnecessary corporate subsidies, and offshore tax havens, is designed to withdraw money, the circulation medium that drives economic activity, from the middle class so as to collapse the bargaining power and influence of the middle class.

In order to understand reality, one first has to purge the false myths about economics from one's consciousness.

That is all.