SOME THOUGHTS ON TUESDAY’S DATA
More bad news out on the retail sales front. For some odd reason the mainstream media prefers to ignore the ICSC & Redbook weekly retail sales, but I find them incredibly useful. Redbook is reporting a 4.2% decline in overall same store sales. ICSC came in at -0.9% versus last year and flat on a weekly basis. These are not good numbers for green shoot theorists and likely mean the U.S. consumer is even weaker than many suspect. June retail sales are shaping up to be a real disaster.
On the housing front we got more mixed news. Existing home sales came in lower than expected at 4.77M units. This represents a -3.6% year over year change and a 2.4% monthly climb. Year over year prices fell 16.8%. Total inventories fell to 9.6 months – this is certainly the green shoot in the data though still a very high inventory level. The worse than expected results could be signs that we are beginning to move beyond the very strong spring season. The true test of the housing market will come in the back half of the year.
Hey Prag – love yr stuff – any thoughts on the Redbook data now that WalMart no longer supplies data – is that whatthe big drop is? or did they back fill and change the index?
I’ve been curious about this too (the Wal Mart effect and the lack of attention of the weekly numbers). Yahoo has Personal Spending pegged at a 0.4% uptick, which obviously does not jive with the weekly data. It will be interesting to see how these two data sets mesh come Friday. If they track closer to the weekly numbers, that could make for a huge downside surprise (on what is to me, probably one of the most important numbers, if not the most important). OTOH, if the official monthly report comes out around where the market is anticipating, it might mean that the ICSC/Redbook numbers are much less useful, conspiracy theorizing aside of course.
The apples to apples comps would put the Redbook figures at about a -1.5% for the most recent data. WalMart is skewing the data by about 2.75% according to Redbook. Still very weak retail sales figures. June should come in very weak.
Are you basing that off of the “Redbook makes up 80% of official data” or is there another way to go about extrapolating that? That projects a pretty huge miss, I would expect that to have a pretty negative impact on the market in general, would you agree?
I confirmed the data with the company PR people. The personal spending data this week is for May. The retail sales data from ICSC and Redbook are for June. May retail sales came in at 0.5% so it won’t be surprising to see May spending also up. Ignore it though. It’s rear view mirror data at this point.
Oops. Thanks for pointing that out and keeping us up to date with these recent numbers.
Well, I’m still holding my srs, we’ll see how it goes.
Dropping that inventory is THE ONLY SOLUTION to fixing this housing mess. I would like to see that near 6 months of inventory, which would likely take us through 2010 due to suppressed construction and further price drops.
Let’s rip this frigging bandaid off and get it over with already.