Consumer Economy
- Retail Sales (RSAFS) 735.0B -118.00M (-0.02% m/m) [Tuesday]
- Existing Home Sales (EXHOSLUSM495S) 3.91M -360.0K (-8.43% m/m) [Thursday]
- CPI All Urban (CPIAUCSL) +0.17% m/m [Friday]
- Nonfarm Payrolls (PAYEMS) 158.6M +130.0K (+0.08% m/m) [Wednesday]
Retail Sales [from December] declined slightly; given the index is not “inflation-adjusted”, this is a recessionary result. This is just one month, but RSAFS has not done well for the past 3 months.
Existing home sales plunged and are around multi-year lows. This series is “seasonally adjusted”; is it the winter storm, or are home sales really just that bad? Things haven’t improved since Senile Joe back in 2023-2024.
Note that this series has been truncated at FRED – if you go there, the current “official data” only goes back to 2025. I had an old copy, so I re-added the data back to 2017. My guess: “someone” didn’t want the little people to see just how bad things really are.
Headline CPI came in right around that magic 2% (annualized) number. BOOMING!
Wolf Richter notes that core services CPI rose 0.39% (4.7% annualized). That’s an inflationary Fauci Ouchie.
Services Inflation Spikes in January, but Bad-Joke OER CPI Pushes Down on Year-over-Year CPI. OER is Huge and Bad
(source – wolfstreet)
Wolf doesn’t provide that fantastic core services table anymore, so I had to go find it for myself. You can find the gory details at BLS; I cherry-picked the interesting bits from Table 2 (source – bls.gov), % change y/y:
Beef +15%, Eggs -34%, Coffee +18%, Medicine -0.1%, Tobacco +8.5%, Medical Care +3.9%, Hospital +6.9%, Vax Injury (Home Health) Care +12.7%, Vaxxident Repair +4,9%, Vaxxident insurance +0.5%, Video/game rental +29.4%, and the biggest lie: Health Insurance -2.2%. This is the overall trend – not this month’s change.
ADP (Private) payrolls showed a gain of just 22k jobs last week. This week, the BLS payrolls showed a gain of 108k (private) payrolls. Here’s what the two series look like together – they are a bit choppy, but the trend of both lines appears to be headed lower. I expect the USPRIV number to be revised lower in the coming months. As usual.
- Native-Born, Employed 131.4M -1,195k (-0.90%)
- Foreign-Born, Employed 31.67M +565k (+1.82%)
Those foreign-born are getting the jobs again, and the native-born are losing them. I wonder how this will play in the midterms. “No more
by desert-survivor 
