Try this on for size: Unemployment is really over 20 percent, the U.S. economy now is literally shrinking by 8 percent a year, and consumer prices are jumping by nearly 7 percent.

Sound like doomsday scenario? It’s happening right now, says businessman and consultant John Williams, author of the Web site Shadow Government Statistics, found at shadowstats.com.

The government is creating so much new money, Williams told SmartMoney, that the all-but-inevitable result is hyperinflation, where “your highest denomination, the $100 bill, becomes worth more as toilet paper than money.”

Williams says buy physical gold — bars and coins, not a fund that says it owns gold somewhere.

Williams worked as a consultant for 30 years, recalculating government economic data for corporations to arrive at what he says are more reliable measures, figures that allow for more accurate economic forecasts, SmartMoney reports.

Williams says that because the government spins economic data to illustrate the points it wants to make, the figures we get are far off the mark.

For example, Social Security payments, which are adjusted each year for increases in the cost of living, should be almost twice what they now are — if the figures used were uncorrupted.

Similarly, Seeking Alpha’s Jeff Nielson writes that, prior to the U.S. economy going from a steady decline to a total collapse in 2008, the U.S. government hid that decline by simply pretending that much of the country’s inflation was actually “increasing GDP.”

Data is published, yet so-called experts and media merely regurgitate the government numbers without “pointing at the totally obvious fiction” which was being incorporated into the supposed GDP

“statistic,” Nielson writes.