Michael Shulman

If This Is a Recovery...

A narrow answer to the question of retail sales is the confusion among investors -- and of course, blow dried media pundits -- about retail sales and consumer spending. Government statistics on consumer spending include spending health care -- typically exempt from state taxes. Health care spending, doing very simple math, 17% of the economy or 17 into 65, the percent of the economy that is consumer spending and you can see health care spending is at least 25% of consumer spending. And expenditures are rising monthly due to medical cost inflation. You can do the math and see why retail sales are much worse off than consumer spending. And retail sales drive many kinds of employment, drive rents on retail space and so on, shipping, manufacturing and so on. Bottom line: the fall of retail sales is much worse than consumer spending in general and, in my opinion, not recover to previous levels, holding down employment, especially at the lower end go the job market. Recent surveys by ChangeWave (changewave.com) show consumer spending is flattening out. That being said, do not short the retailers, the Street continues to love them, if you want to short traditional retail, go long Amazon as I recently wrote in my service, ChangeWave Shorts (also ChangeWave.com.