Revisiting US retail sales
I had meant to add this graph into a note from last week.
At the margin, the strong retail sales data does look like it is responding fairly consistently, as one eyeballs it over the past year, to rates and financial conditions. In other words, it is growing but growing more slowly.
It can go quite negative and still be well above trend, however, given how elevated levels of expenditure have been.

Makes for a nightmare, in context of policy.
The only worse job would be someone trying to figure out how to make money from it all…
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