Nominal retail sales grew 1.7% m/m, above Bloomberg consensus of 1.4%. With the advance release of sales, and coincident index from the Philadelphia Fed, we have the following picture.
Standardized indicators:
Nobody knows. But when the official statistics show negative growth, it must be pretty bad.
Employment and goods exports have declined. GDP flatlines in Q4.
That’s my description. From their newly released NBER Working Paper, Bilateral Conflict Risk and Trade: Military Wars, Trade Wars, and Diplomatic Noise, by Joshua Aizenman, Rodolphe Desbordes and Jamel Saadaoui:
Lydia De Pillis has an article in the NYT on how gasoline prices don’t move one-for-one with oil prices:
Front month Brent futures (for June) jumped tonight. Where are gasoline prices going, conditional on those futures being predictive.
Consider this graph, comparing the Administration’s forecast to the latest WSJ forecast, and an error correction model incorporating Census population forecast.
The optimism of Friday has been wiped away. The odds of a re-opening by May 15 down to 37%, and June contracts up by 5.9%.
