Those poor bullhawks. That strange creature – half housing bull, half rate hawk – must be having a few doubts. Personal crises even.
Retail sales for March are in and look, well, crapola. First from the ABS itself:
I will add that on a monthly basis there were a few eye-opening falls for different segments. Department stores were down 3% on the month! Food was down 0.4%. Household goods, eating out and other were all down too. Clothing etc. was up a touch.
There was a rounding up of the February figure but the jump seems to have been almost exclusively within the household goods segment. Open to explanations.
The segments can be volatile month to month but this is seasonally adjusted so typically less than this. Moreover, until recently, there’s been a pretty strong division between discretionary being soft and staples being ok but that seems to have broken with the supermarkets now dragged into weakness in March. It’s hard to believe that this all down to discounting.
Here are two more charts. The first is the history of retail sales, which clearly shows the 2008 trend break toward more conservative consumption attitutdes:
And the last two years, which captures the big pops from stimulus and ongoing conservatism:
Bravo RBA. Boooo bullhawks.
