First of all, my apologies to readers. I wasn't able to get to the longer piece I had hoped to write over the weekend. In the meantime, since both retail sales and CPI were reported on Friday, let's take an updated look at what real retail sales, which almost a year ago I called the "Holy Grail" of leading indicators for jobs.
In the graphs below, real retail sales are in blue, nonfarm payrolls in red, and private sector payrolls - to eliminate the census jobs - in green. With the disappointing job numbers of the last 3 months, are my graphs busted?
Here's the raw numbers, normed so that December 2007 = 100 (so I can show all three together):
and here is their year over year percentage change:
Nope.
