The volume of retail sales (i.e., retail sales after removing the effect of inflation) is a good guide to the level of economic activity.
I only recently started to calculate Big 8 and world retail sales volume, and I have just fixed up the remaining gaps in my data.
I was puzzled as to why the Big 8 retail sales, which is a GDP-weighted index, was weakening. And the answer is China. I suspect Chinese retail sales will continue to weaken. Soggy consumer spending is a sign of ppl's concerns about the weakness of the economy and the drag, on confidence and spending, of the property slump and the deflationary forces in the economy.
Given that the Chinese authorities don't want to reignite the traditional property boom they always used in the past to get growth going again (and, given the demographics, it may in fact be anyway impossible), this slowdown is likely to continue.
The weakness is China is a big negative for world growth, especially since there are not exactly boom conditions elsewhere, while Trump's tariffs will put the kibosh on what growth there is.
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