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Okay, well, I just finished watching the Republican presidential debates on Fox.

And I'm going to give you my thoughts on the debates, the candidates.

But before I do that, I want to talk a little bit about what happened today in the economy

and the markets. You know, there was very little discussion about the economy.

Unfortunately, during the debates, there was a lot of nonsense that was really discussed.

I don't know if debated is the proper word for it.

But I'm going to talk about reality and then I'll focus in on that show.

So first of all, before the US market opened, we did get some week economic data coming out of Europe.

All these PMIs numbers that came out came out weaker than expected.

But then we got the release of the PMI for the US, the flat composite number for August came out this morning.

Just after the market opened, so about 945 Eastern time, we got this release and sure enough in line with the rest of the world,

the number was below estimates, the forecast.

And I'm just going to break it down by sector manufacturing versus service.

So they were looking for the manufacturing index to come out at 48.8.

And it came out at 47. That's weak.

In fact, the range of estimates for that number ranged as high as 49 and a half,

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