US Core Retail Sales m/m

Retail sales for February rose only 0.2% seasonally adjusted, after the big drop in January. Year-over-year, they rose 3.1%, a smaller increase than in January (+3.9%). And they were confusing. Sales at ecommerce retailers, general merchandise retailers (includes Walmart), food and beverage stores, and health & personal care stores all rose at a good clip month-to-month and year-over-year. This would indicate that there is not a general U-turn in consumer spending on goods. Sales at gas stations fell because the price of gasoline ...

Consumers spent at a slower-than-expected pace in February, though underlying readings indicated that sales still grew at a solid pace despite worries over an economic slowdown and rising inflation. Retail sales increased 0.2% on the month, better than the downwardly revised decline of 1.2% the prior month but below the Dow Jones estimate for a 0.6% rise, according to the advanced reading Monday from the Commerce Department. Excluding autos, the increase was 0.3%, in line with expectations. The sales number is adjusted for seasonal ...

We thought a soft January retail sales report was likely given the cold weather and the Los Angeles fires, but it is worse than even our pessimistic forecasts. Headline sales were down 0.9% month-on-month in nominal terms (consensus -0.2%) while the control group that excludes the volatile autos, food service, building materials and gasoline and supposedly better tracks broader consumer trends fell 0.8% (consensus +0.3%). As these are nominal value changes and we know prices rose 0.5% MoM according to the CPI report, this implies ...

US retail sales broadly advanced in December, indicating strong consumer demand to wrap up the holiday season. The value of retail purchases, not adjusted for inflation, increased 0.4% after an upwardly revised 0.8% gain in November, Commerce Department data showed Thursday. Excluding autos and gasoline, sales climbed 0.3%. The retail data showed so-called control-group sales — which feed into the government’s calculation of goods spending for gross domestic product — increased 0.7% in December, the most in three months. The measure ...

Retail sales jumped by 0.7% in November from October, to $720 billion, seasonally adjusted, and October was revised higher (blue in the chart below), and so we look at the 3-month average (red in the chart), which irons out the month-to-month squiggles and includes the revisions, and it jumped by 0.7% as well. November’s sales increase and the three-month average sales increase annualized amount to +8.6%! And it wasn’t just November, or the past three months. The spending spree started in July. Retail sales have sharply accelerated ...