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A heads up: I’ll be appearing on Fox today: Cavuto on Business @ 4:25pm EST.
The topics will be the Federal Reserve and the market, as well as the usual (Retail Sales, Oil, GDP, Jobs and the New Year). Also on will be Bernie Schaeffer of Schaeffer’s Investment Research and Scott Bleier of Hybrid Investors.
One comment you might make on retail sales that you will not hear elswewhere is to talk about real retail sales. Point out that deflator for department store merchandise had been falling at 4%– 5% rate over past few years. That meant that when Walmart and others were reporting 4% -5% gains in same store sales this translated to 8% — 10% gains in “real” sales. Now prices are no longer falling, so 4% to 5% same store sales translates into 4% to 5% gains in “real” sales for this segment of retail sales.
So the same level of same store sales as in earlier years now implies the economy is much weaker.
You did a recent piece on hydrogen powered automobiles.Please realize that hydrogen is not a source of energy, it is analogous to the electrical wires from the utility pole to your house, that is, hydrogen is a means of transporting energy from one place to another. The energy hydrogen contains was imparted to hydrogen when it was MADE from some other energy source, such as fossil fuel, hydro, nuclear, or solar.This notion that we will convert to hydrogen as an “abundant” source of energy is just science fiction and it is a disservice to the public to pretend otherwise. Sure you can run an automobile very fast on a tank of liquid hydrogen but how one makes and stores liquid hydrogen is the big question. It is a question that cannot be answered. Not only is more energy required to make hydrogen than it is possible to recover by burning the hydrogen but storage of liquid hydrogen is not sensible. Liquid hydrogen can only be stored at very low cryogenic temperatures. Such refrigeration itself is very energy intensive and if left to itself, liquid hydrogen will evaporate on its own so that a tank of liquid hydrogen will last only a few days without active refrigeration while the vapor creats a serious explosion hazard. Left in a closed tank, liquid hydrogen w ill increase its pressure almost without limit until the tank explodes.
It is widely believed in your circles that being aggressive enough during your interviews, and the application of enough positive thinking, no matter how misinformed will resolve a l l such minor technical issues. After all,”they” were able to figure out how to get us to the moon, didn’t they?, so “they” can figure out how to do this too. Well, it is not the same class of question and you do great damage to this nation (while prete n di ng to be so patriotic and all that) by perpetuating false hopes of a future with an abundance of hydrogen energy, indefinitely. So don’t believe me, go to MIT or somewhere with prestigious professors who will tell it to you straight. Also be prepared to encounter technical types with their own agenda of some kind who will not tell it to you straight.This is not a matter of faith either.
Jack White ff