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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