The non-existent surge in retail sales

verfasst von Cosa, 16.05.2002, 09:53

Hi!

Nochmals zu den Einzelhandelsumsätze vom Dienstag.

<font size="4">The non-existent surge in retail sales</font>

By Charlie Minter from Comstock Partners, Inc 05-16-2002

As we suspected, the widely ballyhooed April retail sales report was much ado about nothing. As reported on a seasonally adjusted basis (taking into account both the month and the changing date of the Easter holiday) April sales rose 1.2%. This was immediately hailed by economists, strategists and the media as proof that consumers were spending with abandon. A closer examination of the numbers, however, indicate that this is not the case. On an unadjusted basis April sales were up by a meager 0.2% from March. The actual big gain really took place in March, when retail sales increased 12.6% over February. This increase, however, was ignored at the time since it was seasonally adjusted to a gain of only 0.1%.

The concept of seasonal adjustments do make sense, however, since February was a winter month with no holiday. Therefore the March unadjusted gain was also not significant. Given all these caveats, how do we make sense of the numbers?

We believe that the most meaningful way to interpret these figures is to look at them on a year-to-year basis. This eliminates both the random volatility of month-to-month statistics and the difficulty of making proper seasonal adjustments. On this basis, the combined retail sales for March and April 2002 were up 3.9% from a year earlier. Since year-over-year retail sales have been gaining between 3 and 4% since November 2000?with the exception of September and October 2001?we can easily see that there wasn?t any actual spurt in sales in April. While it?s true that sales haven?t fallen out of bed, they haven?t broken out to the upside either.

Kommentar: Das erklärt dann auch die Chain Store Sales, deren Veränderung auf Jahresbasis nicht saisonbereinigt angegeben wird und die ja, wie erwähnt, mit +1,6% deutlich unter den noch zwei Tage zuvor geäusserten Erwartungen von 3-3,5% lagen.

Gruss
Cosa

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gesamter Thread:

• The non-existent surge in retail sales - Cosa, 16.05.2002, 09:53
  • Re: retailsales und inflationsraten - tas, 16.05.2002, 15:23