Retailers May Still Be In The Red After Black Friday – Ep. 120

* Tomorrow is Thanksgiving Day, one day before Black Friday
* The one day of the year where Americans make their annual pilgrimmage there they stampede to the nearest mall to buy stuff they really don'[t need and can't afford
* It's almost like a black and blue weekend
* I believe that this will be a pretty weak holiday weekend; by the time we get the sales numbers next week, it's going to be pretty dismal
* The news that brought the euro down this morning was rhetoric coming from Mario Draghi , head of the ECB
* He's talking about expanding the QE program to a 2-tiered system
* Why is Draghi so determined to talk down the euro and talk up inflation?
* He is in pursuit of Keynesian economics' holy grail - inflation
* If only we can succeed in getting prices to go up faster then we would have economic growth and prosperity
* Believing that a rising cost of living is the secret sauce of economic growth
* If you search the internet, you see that no one is critical of this
* If rising prices are so important, why not just raise the VAT?
* You could obtain the exact amount of inflation desired if the real goal is to rais prices
* But that's not really the goal, because they would just raise the VAT
* The real goal is to wipe out government debt and to mitigate the effects of wage hikes imposed by the government
* Academia and the press all give them a pass on the idea that rising prices create prosperity
* The truth is the reverse: prosperity comes from reducing costs
* As things get cheaper, more people can afford them - I use the example of cell phones
* Now even poor people can afford a cell phone
* Falling prices lift standards of living and falling prices result from a productive economy
* Inflation results from government interference and it doesn't make things better
* Let's go over the economic data this week
* It's been a mixed bag
* On Monday we did get the manufacturing PMI number, expected to come in at 54.5 which would have been an improvement
* Instead, we got 52.6, the lowest number in 2 years
* I've been talking about this for a long time on this podcast - the manufacturing recession is already here
* The mainstream media dismisses this because manufacturing is so small it doesn't really matter
* That statement says so much
* A downturn in manufacturing will preclude a downturn in the service sector
* We also got existing home sales that came out on Monday - they were below estimates
* There's plenty of evidence that the housing market has already rolled over, and if the Fed were to raise interest rates, it would push it even further down that hill.
* The big number that came out yesterday was the revision to Q3 GDP
* Initially the government reported that the GDP was up 1.5%
* Everybody expected an upward revision and that's exactly what we got - a revision to 2.1
* The problem was, the number was due to a big build in inventory
* I have been talking about this for months on this podcast; we have huge amounts of unsold inventory
* Businesses have been more optimistic than they should have been based on the Fed's recovery rhetoric
* This mistake shows up as a positive in the GDP
* The other big factor is that the government assumes that inflation is just 1.3%
* I don't believe that for a second
* Health insurance alone is costing the average American's cost of living more than 2%
* Today the Atlanta Fed just reduced their Q4 GDP estimate from 2.3% down to 1.8%
* What the third quarter giveth, the fourth quarter taketh away
* Buried in that GDP report are some other bad numbers
* There was a 4.7% decline in corporate profits for the quarter - the biggest decli...

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