- by New Deal democrat
A few days ago Prof. Menzie Chinn at Econbrowser posted the below graphs comparing the time that hard vs. soft data reacted to economic shocks:
As you know, I have been looking at hard “high frequency” data to see if any of the effects of Tariff-palooza! have shown up yet.
And so far, the signs are meager.
Here is this morning’s update of consumer retail spending YoY from Redbook:
In the last week, it has slowed down to a 5.4% increase YoY, about average for the past 12 months.
And I won’t even bother with the graph of restaurant reservations, one of the easiest things for consumers to cut back on. Suffice it to say that they are up about 8% YoY.
If consumers aren’t cutting back on their discretionary spending, what about effects on the supply side?
Here is the latest graph from the AAR of rail traffic for the week of May 10, showing both the comparison of the same week YoY, and cumulatively this year so far vs. 2024:
The only sign of weakness here is that at the beginning of April cumulative 2025 intermodal traffic was higher by 8.7% YoY. Since then almost every week that number has declined, such that last week it was only up 7.9%.
And what about shipping? A month ago there was a flurry of reporting about collapsing inbound ship traffic. So I have been paying attention to the weekly inbound numbers for the Port of Los Angeles.
Here’s what the last 7 weeks look like in TEU volumes:
WEEK. 2025. 2024
4/26. 119.8. 76.8
5/3. 85.5. 95.5
5/3. 85.5. 95.5
5/10. 74.9. 111.4
5/17. 86.6. 98.6
5/24. 103.1. 66.0
5/31. 60.8. 91.9
6/7. 96.1. 98.9
TOTAL 626.8 638 (-1.9%)
Ex-4/26 507.0. 562.0 (-9.8%)
Note that the traffic that arrived during the week of April 26 probably started its journey before “Liberation Day,” which is why I included the second figure. But even so, while there has been a decline, it has not been as drastic as first reported.
And Wall Street has rebounded sharply on the “TACO” trade, which stands for “T—-p Always Chickens Out”:
As of the close yesterday, the S&P 500 was only down -2.9% from its all time high.
The bottom line is that so far almost no hard data is reflecting an impact from Tariff-palooza! - at least, not yet.