Retail sales unexpectedly up in March!

Go figure. Analysts projected less and it was the largest increase since Jan 2023.

The advanced estimate of retail sales showed an increase of 1.4% on the month, better than the 1.2% Dow Jones estimate and higher than the 0.2% increase in February. The year-over-year rise was 4.6%, according to numbers adjusted for seasonality but not prices, while the monthly increase was the biggest since January 2023.

I guess the American consumer has just not gotten the message. Now that Donald Trump is President again, it is time to be pessimistic and stop spending money. But of course, sometimes the American consumer has a mind of their own and inexplicitly does not follow what the conventional wisdom suggests.

Of course at issue is "polling" numbers that make up or consumer sentiment and many of these numbers have been dropping, even as the hard numbers have not. So either the people are lying to the pollsters who take these consumer sentiment polls or the polls are not correctly capturing true consumer sentiment.

Now, of course March was before the most controversial parts of the tariff fiasco came to pass, so not sure why people believed that spending would have somehow been retroactively affected back to January -March. Apparently I am not just not gifted enough the ways of time travel to figure all of that out.