Earlier today the Federal Reserve Open Market Committee, (FOMC) began their 2-day meeting

It concludes tomorrow and at 2:00 they will announce their decision on interest rates

Nobody is anxiously awaiting that announcement

Although there were plenty of fools a few months ago who actually believed the Federal Reserve would be raising interest rates, in fact they thought they were going to raise them in March and then, when they didn't there were a lot of people who still thought they might do it in April

But some of these fools still believe the Fed is going to hike rates later in the year - maybe June

Maybe June, September and December

There are still people, like Goldman Sachs, who are looking for 3 rate hikes this year

I was on a panel months ago with Jim Rickards, whom I have a lot of respect for, and back then he argued with me, because he believed the Fed would raise rates 2 if not 3 times in 2016

I said the Fed would not raise rates at all

Today I posted an interview that he gave on Bloomberg - now Jim Rickards says Janet Yellen has gone super-dove and she is not going to raise rates

The reason Jim Rickards disagreed with me on the panel a couple of months ago is that, although he agrees with my thoughts on the economy, is that he thought the Fed would not recognize that the economy is very weak, rather that it believes the economy is still recovering

He thought the Fed would raise rates anyway, which would cause a recession, cause the Fed to abort the increases, go back to zero and to QE4

I said, I think we are going to skip all the rate hikes and go directly to rate cuts and QE4

And now I think Jim has joined me in that perspective

The question is: Will the Federal Reserve actually admit that the economy is that weak, or just not raise rates, which is tantamount to an admission of weakness

We are going to get the first official look at Q1 GDP on Thursday

There's a good chance that we will print a negative number

And even if we don't print a negative number, it will be a single digit number less than 1

And by the time they revise it the following month to incorporate all the bad news that comes after Thursday, I think they will revise it negative

Which means we're in a recession

If Q1 is negative, and I don't believe we will get a bounce-back in Q2

I think Q1 is the high water mark and it's down hill from here

I think Q2 will be weaker regardless of how weak Q1 is, because we borrowed growth from Q2 because we had the warmest winter in 120 years

Companies are now winding down their bloated inventories that they built up the last couple of years

And because the trade deficits are getting bigger and not smaller

So we have a lot weighing down GDP in Q2 in an already weak economy

By the way, the Atlanta Fed revised up their Q1 GDP number from .3 to .4

Why did they do that?  This is the second time the Atlanta Fed has upwardly revised their estimate, despite the fact that the economic data has gotten worse since their last estimate

If the data gets worse, why would you revise your forecast up?

To me something's going on, maybe it's the boys at the New York Fed putting pressure on Atlanta to be more optimistic, but we'll see, because we will get the first official numbers on Thursday

Let me go over some of the economic data that has come out just since my last podcast

On Friday last week, we got the PMI Flash Index for April - not a Q1 number

One of the first numbers for Q2 and it ain't pretty - the consensus was for an improvement

March was 51.4, and 52 was expected - we got 50.8 - much weaker than the Atlanta Fed thought

New Home Sales missed; they were looking for 522,000, we got 522,000

The Dallas Fed Manufacturing Survey General Activities Index, which was -13.6 in March

They were looking for an improvement to -9 in April and instead we got -13.9

This is a Q2 number

But the big number that should have caused the Dallas Fed to go down was Durab...