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Peter Schiff: Holiday Sales Crater by 11%: We are Back in a RECESSION!

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Last year was the worst retail year since 2009, but of course that was attributed to the inclement snowy “weather”. Now, it turns out that this year is an outright disaster.

The National Retail Federation just reported absolutely abysmal numbers: sales during the four-day Thanksgiving holiday period crashed by a whopping 11% from $57.4 billion to $50.9 billion, confirming what everyone but the Fed knows by now: 

The US middle class is being obliterated, and that key driver of 70% of US economic growth is in the worst shape it has been since the Lehman collapse, courtesy of 6 years of Fed’s ruinous central planning. 

As the WSJ reports, NRF’s CEO attributed the drop to a combination of factors, including the fact that retailers moved promotions earlier this year in attempt to get people out sooner and avoid what happened last year when people didn’t finish their shopping because of bad weather.

Also did we mention the NRF is perpetually cheery and always desperate to put a metric ton of lipstick on a pig? Well, hold on to your hats folks:
 

The National Retail Federation attributed the declines to better online offerings and an improving economy

So there you have it, the lipstick on a pig excuse: a 11% collapse in retail spending has just been spun as super encouraging for the US economy, whereby US consumers aren’t spending because the economy is simply too strong, and the only reason they don’t spend is because they will spend much more later. Or something like that.

The retail trade group said the number of people who went shopping over the four-day weekend declined by 5.2% to 134 million, from 141 million last year.

And it’s now due to online sales or offerings. 

As ZH reports : “Despite many retailers offering the same discounts on the Web as they offered in stores, the Internet didn’t attract more shoppers or more spending than last year. Online sales accounted for 42% of sales racked up over the four-day period, the same percentage as last year, though up from 26% in 2006,” the trade group said.

In fact, it was worse: “Shoppers spent an average $159.55 online, down 10.2% from $177.67 last year.”

But the propaganda piece de resistance is without doubt the following:

“A highly competitive environment, early promotions and the ability to shop 24/7 online all contributed to the shift witnessed this weekend,” the NRF said.

The economist Peter Schiff says, “Black Friday sales figures are out. This year the merchants opened the stores earlier than ever, on Thursday, to get a jump on sales. This holiday weekend, shoppers had more hours to shop than in any other prior holiday weekend. Despite that, and the big drop in gasoline prices, sales traffic was down over 5% for the entire weekend and they spent 11% less.

If this weekend sets the trend for the holiday, it might be an even worse Christmas than 2009. How can this be when we are supposed to be in an economic recovery?

What is it going to take for people to realize we are going back into recession? 

A long-time K Mart worker said in an article is the The New York Times , “Back in the day, there used to be a lot of people who wandered the aisles on Black Friday. This year is really slow. There is a big difference from last year. It’s never been this slow.” So that tells you the true nature of this economy and that it’s even worse than 2009, when we had the big financial collapse from 2008.

If this is the year that the recovery is so strong – that we don’t need QE anymore, then where is the evidence? 

When are people going to recognize the recession is back?”

So to summarize: holiday sales plunged, and Americans refused to shop because the economy is “stronger than ever” and because Americans have the option of shopping whenever, which is why they didn’t shop in the first place. That, and of course plunging gasoline prices leading to… plunging retail sales…

Are you confused yet?



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