* 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...Our Sponsors:* Check out Infinite Epigenetics: https://infiniteepigenetics.com/GOLD* Check out Justin Wine and use my code SCHIFF20 for a great deal: https://www.justinwine.comPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

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“What did the council decide on item 42?” — answered with the speaker and the moment.

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