We've had a lot of volatility in the markets in the last couple of days, stock markets, currency markets.

I know on Wednesday, I think the Dow was down about 250 points and the other markets were down as well.

Today, the Dow was up at one point. It was up more than 200 points. Although by the time they rang the closing bell, the Dow was up just over 60 points.

It's interesting that catalysts for the rally because we had this 200 point rally really right out of the gate when they rang the bell.

The real catalyst was the retail sales report that came out about an hour before the market opened.

If you look at what the expectations were, it was for a gain of 0.4% for November retail sales.

We ended up with a gain of 0.7%, so it was better than expected. A lot of that is due to auto sales.

The reason that autos are selling so briskly is because anybody who could fog a mirror or a rearview mirror can get a car now thanks to the government.

You have an explosion and subprime auto lending. People are taking advantage of the cheap money and buying cars.

These people might not actually be able to pay for the cars. But hey, that's the government just trying to goose the numbers.

They don't care. They just want to make the economy look good.

But if you ex out automobiles and if you ex out gasoline because of course you would expect spending to be off somewhat on gasoline because gas prices are down.

Oil by the way today finished just below 60 dollars a barrel. So 59 and change. This is a new low for the move and a new what five year lower so in crude prices.

But if you ex out gasoline at automobiles. The number came in at 0.6 versus an expectation of 0.5. I mean barely beat it. I mean 0.6 they're expecting 0.5.

Now maybe some people thought that the number would have been a lot lower. I mean I was actually expecting the number to miss. That was going to be my expectation. And so we didn't miss.

Although maybe some of the sales in November were borrowed from December. Maybe some of the stores had been running promotions all month in November. And maybe we stole some of the sales that might otherwise have taken place in December. We'll see.

But if you look at last month the October number. That was revised up from 0.6 to 0.7 growth. So this month November was actually below the figure for the prior month. So declining into the holiday season. I don't know that that's necessarily good news.

But just this tiny little beat of expectations. Sent the Dow on a you know on a rocket ship up. And of course the dollar went up on this good news about American spending money.

And of course again the economy is not driven by spending. It's driven by savings and production which we don't have but you can keep a bubble going with the spending. And that you know really people don't make a distinction between a bubble economy and a genuine economy.

Just as long as the bubble can keep inflating that's all anybody really cares about. And the evidence of that is the fact that they're still spending even if the money is being borrowed and is never going to be repaid. As long as we spend it. Well hey that's all anybody cares about.

But it was such a slight beat. It's kind of amazing that they would react. But this is kind of how it's been going. I've been talking about this. Any kind of good news that comes out. They just jump all over it. Right. And they exaggerated and expand on it. And they infer all sorts of great things about the economy.

Now I was hearing on CNBC. Oh this this strong number proves how big a boost consumers are getting from lower gas prices. When if you actually look at the reduction in what American spent on gasoline. It's very very minor. I mean it's such a small little decline and overall spending. It's hardly enough to compensate for a lot of other prices that are going up.

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