The Advance Retail Sales Report released this morning shows that sales in April rose 0.1% month-over-month, down from 1.5% in March, which was revised from 1.2%. Core Retail Sales (ex Autos) was a flat 0.0% in April, down from 1.0% in March, which was revised from 0.7%.
Today's headline and core numbers were substantially below the Investing.com forecasts, which were 0.4% for Headline and 0.6% for Core.
The first chart below is a log-scale snapshot of retail sales since the early 1990s. I've included an inset to show the trend in this indicator over the past several months.
Here is the Core version, which excludes autos.
Here is a year-over-year snapshot of overall series.
Here is the year-over-year performance of at Core Retail Sales.
Here is an overlay of Headline and Core Sales since 2000.
After the April Consumer Price Index is released on Thursday, we'll take a more detailed look at retail sales adjusted both for inflation and population growth.
Bottom Line: The Advance retail sales for April, both headline and core, were a major disappointments. The hope that the winter slump was strictly weather related is now questionable. The overall trend in the YoY numbers have been downward since the summer of 2011.
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