If your looking to take a break from last minute Christmas shopping insanity here are some interesting articles:

Strategic defaults – conditioning, morality, or naïveté?  – THE BIG PICTURE

The Jobless Rate for People Like You – New York Times – Interactive

Seven U.S. Banks Are Seized, Raising Year’s Failure Toll to 140 – Bloomberg

The big economic number of the week is the Retail Sales numbers coming out Friday from the U.S. Census Bureau.  For those that are interested to look at more details on the numbers you can go to Census Bureau .  The upcoming numbers are for the month of November.  The market is expecting an increase of 0.6% month over month (from Oct to Nov).  The prior month saw an increase of 1.4% (from Sep to Oct)

Below is a big picture chart showing all the data from the Census Bureau, which goes back to Jan. 1992.  You can see the significance of the financial crisis with the large drop that started in 2008.  The recession of the early 2000’s doesn’t even show a blip compared to the current recession.

The next chart shows a zoom in of the large dip that started in 2008 and recent numbers.

A few months ago I dove into some research on the Housing Permits and how they are as a leading indicator since CNBC and gang will base an entire economic recovery call on them.  I wanted to see the real relation of the markets moves and this data.  And this past Friday the data for June came out and got everyone excited again.  Below are a couple things:

• First is a video from the Larry the Krudlow show … im not even sure what its called anymore since he got blasted off the air for a while after his goldilocks economy blackeye.  Anyways if you watch around the 4 minute mark he starts throwing out their classic charts showing a very small data range of a few months… a perfect example of how they deceive from the big picture of historic all time lows and about a 75% depression from the peak in this data.  The video is followed on the full post page by the chart that would never be shown on CNBC on Housing Permits and where we are.
• Second is the updated report (PDF) that I put together that has:  (1) a historical comparison to the mid 1970’s recovery in relation to Housing Permits. (2) Does housing permits predict market tops and/or bottoms?  (3)  Going forward a view that isn’t talked about, where housing permits reverse and break their lows.

Chart CNBC would never show (next page in full post):

Today the Federal Reserve spoke and the results were what everyone expected, which was the Fed was going to stand pat and keep their current policies in place.

Fed policymakers held a key bank lending rate at a record low of between zero and 0.25 percent and pledged to keep it there for “an extended period” to help brace the economy.

The Fed acknowledged that energy and other commodity prices have risen recently. But policymakers predicted that idle factories and the weak employment market would make it hard for companies to ratchet up prices. The Fed said it expects inflation will “remain subdued for some time.”

The most important part of any Fed Rate decision is the markets reaction;  and although the decision was an expected result the market responded pretty dramatically in a negative fashion.  The Dow, which was up around 100 points throughout the morning, finished down 23 points.  And also of note is that the decline was on high volume.

On the Full post are some charts of interest.

• First is a chart from dshort.com that shows the history of inflation from the Bureau of Labor Statistics through the CPI..  to show some of what the Fed is looking at for inflation information to base their decisions on.
• Second is a chart showing the S&P 500 reaction today to the decision.   (You will have to click below on Read Full Post to view these)