Fred B. Moseley wrote: >The point that is missed by the newspaper headlines and these excerpts is >that retail sales as a whole, INCLUDING autos, DECLINED by 0.2% in >January. Not a huge decline, but a decline. > >The AP headline from the NY Times website was "Retail Sales Rise Sharply >in January." Then the first sentence reads: "A drop in car sales ... >pushed down sales at the nation's retailers by 0.2 percent in January." > >Then it goes on to say: "Excluding volatile automobile sales, overall >retail sales rose by a solid 1.2 percent in January."
There are two good reasons to strip away car sales - one, is that they're normally volatile, and can provoke meaningless swings in the headline number, and two, the 0% financing incentives last year stole a bunch of early '02 sales. So anyone trying to measure the underlying trend in consumption would want to see what's going on ex-autos. But good progressive economists are irresistibly drawn to the negative number. The weight of the evidence is that the U.S. economy is troughing, or did bottom out around December. This could be a false bottom, a pause before another downleg; the recovery could be weak, and might feel little different from recession. But there's not much point in ignoring the evidence. Doug
