What if it wasn’t the Weather ?

Todays retail sales number has to give the Happy Talk crowd a pause.  There is no question that the large corporations are squeezing out the little guy in retail, just look at all the closed stores in your town.  This started with Wal-Mart years ago and who knows where it will end, but the fact remains that the consumer is stretched and the main street economic base is crumbling.

I have added Elizabeth Warren’s book “A Fighting Chance” to my reading pile.  It seems to me that reading or rereading, moving back and forth between four or five books, gives time for insights to settle.  Currently I am rereading John Mauldin’s “EndGame”; while reading  Thomas Piketty’s “Capital in the Twenty First Century”, Yuval Levin’s “The Great Debate” (a good review of the historical under pinnings of the conservative-liberal debate); and to put it all into perspective, James Hillman’a “The Force of Character”.  You may notice that I am not reading Tim Geithner’s or Hank Paulson’s explanation of history, we already know from where they come.