The National Retail Federation threw some cold water on the holiday:

WASHINGTON--(BUSINESS WIRE)--The National Retail Federation today released its 2009 holiday forecast, projecting holiday retail industry sales to decline one percent this year to $437.6 billion.* While this number falls significantly below the ten-year average of 3.39 percent holiday season growth, the decline is not expected to be as dramatic as last year’s 3.4 percent drop in holiday retail sales nor as severe as the 3.0 percent decline in annual retail industry sales expected for all of 2009.**

No, really? Gee, who saw this coming?

On the Pearl River Delta, China's major export base, orders at many shoemakers were already low as the situation has gone from bad to worse. According to China Business News, a European customer's sudden cancellation of an order for original high-end shoes at an unnamed company might cause that company's bankruptcy as it has already bought materials and entered production.

And what foreshadowed this report? Why this Ticker and the article that spawned it.....

Remember, this is the time when Christmas goods are on the way. You can't order something from China, have it produced, and then have it sent in a ship in a week. Uh uh. Those goods have been ordered now, they are in the pipeline for delivery now, or they're not coming.

They're not coming.

Flat to down 1% is insanely optimistic folks.

Originally posted by Evasius

...If you would like I can provide more links if you want to research the GCP or Timewave further...

Government Violates The Citizens (Again)

This is going to be an ongoing series, I suspect - tracking government abuse of the citizenry via debt-shifting.

What am I referring to? Simple: Back-door bailouts of banks and industry (notably the auto industry) through farcical programs that con the citizens of the nation to take on unsustainable debt, thereby transferring what should be a corporate or bank failure to into a whole bunch of personal bankruptcies.

There are two programs in particular that exemplify this attempt; "cash for clunkers" and the various machinations in the housing space, including the insanely loose FHA credit procedures.

Cash for Clunkers violated two basic premises: It destroyed perfectly good capital assets (older cars that were in good running condition; indeed, it required 12 months of continual insurance coverage and registration - that is, proof of being in good running order for the past year - to qualify!) and replaced them with a vehicle that had a presumed debt load on it.

Now we find out that indeed (as I have long suspected) the government's insane FHA approvals of patently unsustainable loans was an intentional act:

Barney Frank, the Massachusetts Democrat who is chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, said in an interview that the defaults were, in essence, worth it.

“I don’t think it’s a bad thing that the bad loans occurred,” he said. “It was an effort to keep prices from falling too fast. That’s a policy.”

Got that? It's a policy to intentionally bankrupt people so as to allow banks who have made bad mortgages a chance to avoid their own bankruptcy.

Dennis Kneale, Larry Kudlow, hell, name a "mouthpiece" on ToutTV or in the sell-side of Fraud Street and you'll find someone claiming that "the recession is over."

But if it is, how can this be true?

Lockyer’s spoke before Controller John Chiang said state general fund revenue fell $1.1 billion below estimates during the first three months of the fiscal year that began July 1.

Let's boil this down a bit: Sales tax revenues came in at $99.8 million, or 4.5% lower than expected.

Income tax revenues were also off big, but remember that income taxes are (usually) progressive, so [color=Yellow] a loss in income translates into a larger drop in tax revenues (as an aside this, my friends, is why "tax the rich" only works when the rich are getting richer - when they start to get poorer as a consequence of your redistribution schemes and move down the tax ladder, your income tax receipts collapse!) while sales taxes are a straight percentage of sales, often with the only exception that would skew on an income basis being food. [/color]

This strongly implies that California saw gross consumer sales off about 4.5% from where they expected; this, of course, raises the question "what was expected?"