Yes, Falling Gasoline Prices Can Easily Sway Overall Retail Activity
The string of weak retail sales reports in the first four months of 2015 are not an indication of slowing overall economic activity. Instead, recent weakness in the retail data merely reflects the steep fall in sales at gasoline stations since November 2014. In our pic-of-the-week, retail sales minus gasoline station sales continues to show a very steady uptrend, even in the most recent data.