I want to publish information about the economy that I get from my job. But I don't want to lose my job. So for now I will stick with a vague indication that people are not spending as much in retail stores the past 3 weeks. So far the average weekly retail sales for September are 10% lower than August.
This is bad news, consumers are not handling the skyrocketing gas prices well especially since a lot of new cars were purchased in the summer, this is bad news for retailers. Which is in turn bad news for the economy. Hopefully holiday spending wont be affected this badly, but if this downward trend continues for so long we may be at risk for inflation and recession.
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2 comments:
Maybe the over 1 billion dollars in charitable giving since Hurricane Katrina has something to do with those numbers ?
J.D.
Possibly, I will look and see if there was a similar reaction after the Tsunami. I think that might be another contributing factor but I still think there is reason for concern because of the high gas prices. Also there was a lot of car buying this summer and the payments should begin around now which could be contributing as well.
Historically the indexes we have are pretty stable, and other similar indicators are seeing the same or a worse drop in retail sales. It will be interesting to see if this is a trend or just a bad week.
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