Happy Consumers, Sad Factories

We had two economic reports this morning. They basically show more of the same: consumers are happy while factories are not.

Let’s start with retail sales for October. This is often a good proxy for consumer spending. The report showed an increase of 0.3% which was 0.1% better than expected. When you take out sales of vehicles and gasoline, then retail sales were up 0.1%. So far this year, retail sales are up 3.1%. Overall, consumers are holding up the economy.

The other report showed that industrial production fell 0.8% last month. Much of that was due to the GM strike. Even when we exclude auto output, industrial production was still down 0.5% in October. Over the last year, industrial production is down 1.1%.

Posted by on November 15th, 2019 at 12:49 pm


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