In May, retail sales dropped, and the stock market dropped in step with data delivered by the Commerce Department retail sales report. The new normal is now stock market volatility. The stock market really rose on Thursday before reversing direction early Friday when the May retail sales report was released. A schizophrenic market then seesawed throughout the day as conflicted investors weighed the negative retail sales report with an unexpectedly good analysis of consumer confidence.
Article Resource: Low retail sales, rising consumer confidence calm volatile stocks By Personal Money Store
Commerce Department and retail sales
On Thursday, retail sales derailed the optimism of a late stock market rally. As outlined by the New York Times, Wall Street indexes fell Friday morning after the Commerce Department reported that retail sales decreased 1.2 percent last month, the largest drop since last fall. Five of 13 retail sales figure categories in the report decreased with the largest drop in building materials at 9.3 percent. Excluding all of the sales to commercial fleets (overall auto sales increased in May), retail auto sales were down 1.7 percent.
Volatility week for the stock market
Despite the volatility in the stock market, all 3 major indexes closed higher for the week. Stock prices dove in the last hour Monday (because of the jobless report), rebounded Tuesday (reassuring words from the Federal Reserve), dove again Wednesday (political pressure on BP dividends) and bounced back Thursday (because of overseas economic reports). According to the Times, Friday’s session, its volatility tempered by the good cop/bad cop consumer confidence and retail sales reports, made the difference for the somewhat happy ending.
Forecast beat by consumer confidence rate
A few hours after the May retail sales report sent investors out of stocks and into bonds, the Reuters/University of Michigan consumer sentiment index for early June came in higher than expected at 75.5, which is actually up from 73.6 at the end of May and better than the 74.5 economists had been expecting. Forbes reports the disparity between the retail sales and consumer confidence reports signifies that many Americans still feel that their personal finances are under stress when they see the overall economy to be on the mend and hope for better days ahead.
Silver lining of retail sales
An analysis of the sales report shows why consumers on main street feel much safer than those on Wall Street. Frank Ahrens who is from the Washington Post points out that even though retail sales dropped 1.2 percent from April to May, compared with May 2009 retail sales were actually up 7 percent. Ahrens goes further to say that when excluding all of the negative numbers from bigger pieces of the pie that are taken by auto sales, building materials and gasoline (down 3.3 percent) overall retail sales actually rose .1 percent in May.
Find a lot more data on this topic
New York Times
nytimes.com/2010/06/12/business/12markets.html?src=mv
Forbes
forbes.com/2010/06/11/briefing-markets-economy-bp-retail-sales-consumer-sentiment-oil-spill-google-financials.html?boxes=Homepagechannels
Frank Ahrens
voices.washingtonpost.com/economy-watch/2010/06/retail_sales_drop_but_consumer.html
