Economists surveyed by Briefing.com are expecting the 8:30 a.m. New York time report on November retail sales to show month to month growth of 0.2%.
That wouldn’t be quite so likely to disappoint the market except that retail sales climbed 0.8% month to month in October. The numbers don’t look a whole lot better if you use retail sales ex-auto in order to get rid of some volatility in the report. Economists are expecting 0.4% month to month growth ex-auto. But that would still be down from 0.7% growth in October.
We’ve got a classic tough comparison situation here.
At a time when everyone seems to be worried about a slowdown in economic growth that could be exactly what the market doesn’t want to hear.
The big danger is that market talking heads could well extrapolate from this data point to a larger economic trend.
