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 decline in corporate profits since 2009.

Think about this: corporate profits are declining and inventories are growing

Sales are down, profits are down; what does that tell you about employment?

Continuing unemployment claims are continuing to rise

If the Fed is really data dependent, then the fact that employment trends are starting to reverse could be sign...