Retail sales jumped 9.8% m/m, exceed Bloomberg's consensus of 5.9%. Sales ex-food services rose 9.4% in nominal terms, 8.7% if deflated by the CPI-all.
Figure 1: Retail sales excluding food services, deflated by CPI-all (blue), manufacturing and trade sales in Ch.2012$ (red), personal consumption expenditure deflators in Ch.2012$ (green), all seasonally adjusted. Source: Census Bureau, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, BEA, BLS via FRED, and author’s calculations.
Retail sales ex-food services, deflated by the CPI, kind of tracks manufacturing and trade industry sales, which I’ve been monitoring, following the NBER. It also moves with consumption — but in both cases, deflated retail sales have risen faster than either of the latter two series, measured in Chained 2012$. Nonetheless, the fact that retail sales, which is released before the other two series, leads to hope for continued recovery in consumption.
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