A "shocking" drop in US retail sales was announced this morning and is starting to inspire doubt that perhaps the recession/depression may not quite be over yet. Looking through the numbers, there aren't very many big surprises with auto and electronics being hurt the most on a percentage basis, and general drops across the board. One surprise is that comparing Mar 09 to Mar 08, we're looking at slight increases in health/personal care and essentially flat numbers in the "hobby"section - depression inspired austerity hasn't fully hit in those sectors but we would expect them to eventually join the rest of the pack. Of course, these are very small numbers of the overall total so the effect is minimal.
Another interesting note was the market reaction to the news release; stock futures fell while Treasuries slightly rose, almost on news release indicating that much of this hasn't been priced i! nto the market yet. This could serve as an indicator of what future negative "unexpected" shocks could do to the market, despite the proclamations on CNBC that most/all of this has already been priced in and we only have room to go up at this point. This release was far from shocking as most smart money was not buying the consensus 0.3% increase in retail sales.
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