Monthly GDP through March is up, while April CPI-deflated retail sales are down. The industrial and manufacturing production release is tomorrow.
Figure 1: NFP employment (bold blue), civilian employment with smoothed population controls (bold orange), industrial production (red), personal income excluding current transfers in Ch.2017$ (bold light green), manufacturing and trade sales in Ch.2017$ (black), and monthly GDP in Ch.2017$ (pink), GDP (blue bars), all log normalized to 2025M01=0. Source: BLS via FRED, BLS, Federal Reserve, BEA 2026Q1 Advance release, S&P Global Market Insights (nee Macroeconomic Advisers, IHS Markit) (5/13/2026 release), and author’s calculations.
Figure 2: Civilian employment adjusted to NFP concept smoothed population controls (bold orange), manufacturing production (red), ADP private nonfarm payroll employment (light green), real retail sales, CPI deflated (black), freight services indexes (brown), and coincident index in Ch.2017$ (pink), GDO (blue bars), all log normalized to 2025M01=0. Source: BLS, ADP,via FRED, Philadelphia Fed [1], Philadelphia Fed [2], Bureau of Transportation Statistics, Federal Reserve via FRED, BEA 2026Q4 3rd release, and author’s calculations.
Retail sales are down in CPI-deflated terms. Given the spike in gasoline prices, it makes sense to decompose retail sales into gasoline station and non-gasoline stationn sales, as in this post. Real ex-gasoline station sales appear to have fallen in April.
Apparently the talks didn’t go as well as Trump would have liked.
Trump: “When President Xi elegantly referred to the United States as perhaps being a declining nation, he was referring to the tremendous damage we suffered during the four years of Sleepy Joe Biden and the Biden Administration, and on that score he was 100% correct.
“President Xi was not referring to the incredible rise that the United States has displayed to the world during the spectacular 16 months of the Trump Administration.”
Yeah, that’s it Donnie. That’s why you had to go begging to China to bail you out of your fiasco of a war.
Putin thought he would arrive in Kiev in 4 days and Trump thought he would achieve regime change in Tehran in 4 days. They both revealed to the world that they are paper tigers.
And then there’s this. Boeing shares dropped sharply 4% immediately after Trump announced that China would be ordering just 200 jets. Expectations had been for 500.
Trump: “Xi is going to order 200 jets from Boeing. Boeing wanted 150. Got 200. I think it was a commitment. Sort of like a statement.”
Trump’s famous Art of the Deal. Getting less than half of expected and lying about it as a great triumph. Yeah, it was a statement by Xi, for sure.
The Chinese are all celebrating the humiliation of Trump and the decline of the United States.