The Advance Retail Sales Report released yesterday shows that sales in July came in at 0.2% month-over-month, a decline from June's 0.6% (an upward revision from 0.4%). Yesterday's headline number came below the Investing.com forecast of 0.3%. However, Core Retail Sales (which excludes Autos) were up 0.5%, a substantial improvement over last month's 0.1% (an upward revision from 0.0%). Investing.com was looking for 0.4%.
The first chart below is a log-scale snapshot of retail sales since the early 1990s. I've included an inset to show the trend in this indicator over the past several months.
Here is the Core version, which excludes autos.
Here is a year-over-year snapshot of the overall series. Here we can see that, despite the upward trend since the middle of last year, the YoY series has been slowing since its peak in June of 2011.
Here is the same chart excluding the volatile gasoline component.
Here is an overlay of the two since 2000, which gives us a better sense of the added YoY volatility that gasoline is responsible for in the overall retail sales number. For more on gasoline price volatility, see this weekly update.
After the July Consumer Price Index is released on the 15th, we'll take a more detailed look at retail sales adjusted both for inflation and population growth.
Bottom Line: Core retail sales came in stronger than expected, which was a welcome improvement over the weak monthly data since February.