{"id":59390,"date":"2021-09-19T08:00:20","date_gmt":"2021-09-19T13:00:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=59390"},"modified":"2021-09-19T08:00:20","modified_gmt":"2021-09-19T13:00:20","slug":"what-comes-after-mind-blowing-free-money-blow-off-spike-in-retail-sales-a-spike-doesnt-spike-forever","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=59390","title":{"rendered":"What Comes After Mind-Blowing Free-Money Blow-Off Spike in Retail Sales? A Spike Doesn\u2019t Spike Forever"},"content":{"rendered":"
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What Comes After Mind-Blowing Free-Money Blow-Off Spike in Retail Sales? A Spike Doesn\u2019t Spike Forever<\/a><\/h3>\n<\/header>\n
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Powered by price increases.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Total retail sales \u2013 not adjusted for\u00a0inflation, now a big factor<\/a>\u00a0\u2013 inched up 0.7% in August from July, to $619 billion (seasonally adjusted), up a stunning 18% from two years ago and 15.1% from a year ago. The insert in the chart shows that this wasn\u2019t a proper \u201crebound,\u201d as it has been widely called in the media today, but an uptick in a four-month down-trend from the mind-blowing superlative historic free-money blow-off spike in April. August retail sales were down 1.6% from that April stimmie-craziness:<\/p>\n

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A spike doesn\u2019t spike forever. But Americans are still making a heroic effort to spend the pile of free money they got \u2026 the last two stimmies totaling $2,000 per person, the $800 billion in forgivable PPP loans that just about everyone with a little or big business got, extra unemployment benefits, massive gains on asset prices, all of it fueled by the Fed\u2019s $4-trillion money-printing binge and the government\u2019s $5-trillion deficit-spending binge in 18 months, which created the\u00a0most monstrously overstimulated economy and markets ever<\/a>.<\/p>\n

New & used auto dealers and parts stores: Sales dropped another 3.6%<\/strong>\u00a0in August from July, to $121 billion (seasonally adjusted), fourth month in a row of large declines off the free-money spike in March and April.<\/p>\n

There is plenty of demand, and prices have surged amid\u00a0inventory shortages of used vehicles and historic inventory shortages of new vehicles<\/a>. Customers face dealer lots that are nearly empty and out of popular models amid rotating shutdowns of assembly plants globally\u00a0due to the semiconductor shortages<\/a>.<\/p>\n

But these $121 billion in sales in August were still up 10.7% from a year ago and 22.2% from two years ago, in dollar terms, thanks to massive price increases \u2013\u00a032% year-over-year for used vehicles and 7.6% for new vehicles<\/a>, according to the Consumer Price Index.<\/p>\n

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\u2026click on the above link to read the rest of the article\u2026<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

What Comes After Mind-Blowing Free-Money Blow-Off Spike in Retail Sales? A Spike Doesn\u2019t Spike Forever Powered by price increases. Total retail sales \u2013 not adjusted for\u00a0inflation, now a big factor\u00a0\u2013 inched up 0.7% in August from July, to $619 billion (seasonally adjusted), up a stunning 18% from two years ago and 15.1% from a year […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[426,538,4254,4255],"class_list":["post-59390","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","tag-inflation","tag-money-printing","tag-wolf-richter","tag-wolfstreet"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59390","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=59390"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59390\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":59391,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59390\/revisions\/59391"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=59390"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=59390"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=59390"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}