The U.S. Census Bureau announced today that retail and food services sales for May 2008 with seasonal adjustments was up 1.02% over April and up 2.40% compared to a year ago. Retail sales without including autos (excluding autos makes the data less volatile) was up 1.18% compared to the previous month and up 4.61% compared to the previous year.
The month over month numbers were strong. Economists had expected an increase of only 0.7% excluding auto sales. Interestingly the year over year the growth rate actually declined as the increase in May 2007 over April 2007 was even stronger than the increase this year. When including autos and adjusting the numbers for inflation, retail sales declined by 1.2% in May compared to the previous year.
No comments:
Post a Comment