It Kind of Looks Like the American Consumer is Dead, Not Just Taking a Pause

American Consumer RIP

Economic indicators are noisy, meaning that there’s a lot of movement from month to month.  There’s so much noisiness in economic indicators that it causes some market participants to downplay high frequency figures.

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Yesterday's big figure - Retail Sales - could be one of those “just noise” figures.  Retail Sales collapsed in March from 3.7 percent year-over-year growth in February to just 1.7 percent.

The decline, of course, begs the questions, is it just noise or is it a longer term signal?

[drizzle]

The answer - perhaps.

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