Unadjusted January Retail Sales Post Biggest Sequential Plunge In History

[Tylerdurden]

The topic of BLS propaganda seasonal adjustments has been discussed extensively here especially in light of January's NFP beat. We'll leave it at that. However, we were rather surprised to note that the Census Bureau may have also ramped up its seasonal adjustment "fudge factoring" because when looking at the January headline retail sales data, which naturally was a smoothly continuous line on a Seasonally Adjusted basis, rising from $399.9 billion in December to $401.4 billion in January, something rather odd happened in the Unadjusted data set: the plunge from $459.8 billion in December to $361.4 billion in January, or -$98.5 billion in one month, was the biggest one month drop in retail sales in history. Now we won't say much on this topic, suffice to say that it would be far more useful if the BLS and Census Bureaus were to open up their models and explain in nuanced detail just what "old normal" adjustments they still incorporate into data sets. Because as many have already noted, seasonal adjustments used for data from 1980 to 2008 when "up" was the only allowed direction for everything, are completely irrelevant and misleading in the New Deleveraging Normal. Which reminds us: Zero Hedge will offer $10,000 to the first BLS employee to share with us the full and complete excel model set, including assumptions, data tables, and comprehensive output parameters that the agency uses to go from input A to output X. We hope that by spending that money we will finally do society a service and open up to everyone just how it is that the BLS adjusts its Non-Farm Payrolls data.
As for Unadjusted retail sales, here they are:


http://www.zerohedge.com/news/unadju...plunge-history

[Tylerdurden]

Stand by for endless confuse a cat explinations.

[JimD]

There are two possible explanations
1 People are broke
2 People have come to their senses and chose not to throw their money away on crap they don't need.

I vote for number one. Hope that didn't confuse the cat too much.

[Gerarddm]

I thought the sales numbers for December were crazed, given the economy. Perhaps in an effort to make themselves feel happy people went overboard for Christmas and now here is the enviable backlash.

Yet the 1 percent keep spending like they are unaffected, BECAUSE THEY AREN'T.

[Norman Bernstein]

Perhaps someone might ponder just WHY there are seasonal adjustments to these numbers... and why the 'unadjusted' numbers might not tell the whole story.

[Chris Coose]

Think it is somehow connected to that topic about business/manufacturing returning to the US?
Consumers are finding products are worthless. I don't mean worth less. I mean about every thing I buy these days is crap.

[SMARTINSEN]

Make a line connecting the tops from year to year, and then do the same for the bottoms. The black line is unequivocally trending in the right direction. The highs are higher and the lows are about the same, but still trending upward, so what if the differences are greater?

I am glad that the evidence that you present shows that economy is improving. Of course you agree, right?

[RichKrough]

Highest unadjusted (Black Line) December sales in 5 years, smallest January decline in 5 years.

Did I miss something here?

[Tylerdurden]

Make a line connecting the tops from year to year, and then do the same for the bottoms. The black line is unequivocally trending in the right direction. The highs are higher and the lows are about the same, but still trending upward, so what if the differences are greater?

I am glad that the evidence that you present shows that economy is improving. Of course you agree, right?

Any improvement is artificial and fueled by fraud. Of course examples of this have been posted for years now and the same players said the same silly things back in 08' then they said it would improve by the end of the year, then the next then the next. Look around Greece is not burning because of a shortage of olives.

[Tylerdurden]

Follow this thread to find another big gaping hole in the fraud that its getting better.


http://forum.woodenboat.com/showthre...mption-Tanking

[Nicholas Scheuer]

Maybe all of their discretionary spending was in December, eh?

[ljb5]

January looks like a big drop mostly because December was the highest shown on the graph.

January always posts a big drop... but the raw numbers show that January 2012 is the very best January on the graph!

In fact, it's actually better than 11 of 12 months of '09, about half of '10 and about average compared to '07 and '08.

Does anyone believe Tylerdurden's stuff?

[The Bigfella]

Classic TD crud.

[Glen Longino]

TD has become a joke!
I got all fired up for the End Of The World two years ago because of Mark!
What a disappointment when the world just kept on chugging along and left me holding all those damn guns and bullets and shelves full of canned food.
What a joke!

[The Bigfella]

Yeah... the damn bread I put into the basement has gone mouldy too.

[Keith Wilson]

This is very, very silly. Every year people buy a lot of stuff for Christmas, then don't buy much in January. If you look at the December-to-January drop for the other five years shown on the chart, it's pretty much the same every year. The small difference between this year and the last five years is mostly random noise. This is an example of picking carefully through the data to find something which looks like bad news. You might also note that since January '09, the trend line for retail sales is steadily upward. We have lots of real problems; this is not one of them.

[Peter Malcolm Jardine]

January looks like a big drop mostly because December was the highest shown on the graph.

January always posts a big drop... but the raw numbers show that January 2012 is the very best January on the graph!

In fact, it's actually better than 11 of 12 months of '09, about half of '10 and about average compared to '07 and '08.

Does anyone believe Tylerdurden's stuff?

No, never.

[Norman Bernstein]

This is very, very silly.

Of course it is. Consider the source: 'Manufacturing nonexistent controversy and silly conspiracy theories since 2006'