Retail Sales

Not much growth

The latest read on retail sales came in and the growth rate was effectively zero:

Basically, retail has been steady but the monster growth periods seem to be well behind us. Because of this mediocre print, GDPNow clocked Q3 GDP down to 1.6% from 1.8% which means that we are getting closer and closer to three negative quarters of GDP in a row.

I’ll be very curious to see if retail actually slows enough to go negative next month, as that would really start to spell trouble for the overall Q3 GDP picture.