Even though consumer confidence cooled for a second straight month in November, CNBC is reporting that holiday spending for the average American household is on track to be the highest in 12 years.
Amazingly, the CNBC All-America Survey found that the average family will spend $900 for the first time in the 12-year history of the poll, eclipsing last year's estimate of $702 by a wide margin.
The stock of scandal-plagued retailer Steinhoff plunged for the third consecutive day, bringing its total drop in the past 3 days to over 50%, as its biggest shareholder and former Chairman, Christo Wiese, was caught in a vicious margin call, and increased the amount he has raised from selling shares in various related entities such as food retailer Shoprite Holdings Ltd. to 3.3 billion rand ($259 million) as his net worth continues to disintegrate amid the accounting scandal which some - this website included - have likened to a modern-day Enron.
Perhaps the single biggest development this year, as far as the markets were concerned, was the Fed admitting on the record that it has no idea what is going on with inflation.
This represents a kind of endgame for the Fed. Since the early ‘80s, the Fed has been actively understating inflation via a variety of gimmicks.
It first removed home prices and replaced them with “owner’s equivalent rent.” Doing that removed any sharp rise in home prices from affecting inflation data, thereby downplaying the official inflation rate.
This does not fit the narrative... ignore it!
Americans’ outlook for the U.S. economy fell in December to match the weakest for the year and a weekly measure of confidence cooled to a two-month low, even as both gauges remain high by historical standards, the Bloomberg Consumer Comfort Index showed Thursday.
In the most ironic story of the day, the company that makes the paper that Swiss banknotes are printed on was just bailed out by the money-printing, stock-purchasing, plunge-protecting, savior-of-global equities...Swiss National Bank.
While The SNB has a long and checkered history of buying shares in companies... as we have detailed numerous times, it is no stranger to pumping money into companies all over the world...
Including Apple, Alphabet, and Microsoft...