Christmas sales best in six years

Reuters/NY Post:
Sales during the holiday shopping season rose 5.1 percent, to over $850 billion, in 2018, the strongest in the past six years, according to a Mastercard report, as shoppers were encouraged by a robust economy and early discounts.

The data includes in-store and online sales between Nov. 1 and Dec. 24. The National Retail Federation had forecast US holiday retail sales to rise between 4.3 percent and 4.8 percent in November and December.

“From shopping aisles to online carts, consumer confidence translated into holiday cheer for retail,” said Steve Sadove, senior adviser for Mastercard.

Near full employment and rising wages have boosted consumer spending, which in October hit its highest in nearly two decades.

The data also indicated that consumer confidence was not dented by recent volatility in the stock markets and worries over slowing global growth.

With Christmas Eve falling on a Monday this year, customers got an extra day for shopping.

Not surprisingly, online sales posted strong gains, rising 19.1 percent, according to the SpendingPulse retail report, published by Mastercard’s analytics arm.
...
The economy is stronger than many in the media have been willing to admit.  Some on the left are happy to see the decline in the stock market, in hopes that it will hurt Trump who appears to be buoyed by the growth in the economy and the jobs market.  The economies that have the most trouble are the foreign ones who have not embraced the growth programs Trump and the Republicans used to grow that of the US.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Should Republicans go ahead and add Supreme Court Justices to head off Democrats

Washington Post: Some Democrats eye adding more justices to the Supreme Court to change its ideological bent The once-remote idea has gained the attention of liberals angered by the GOP push to remake the federal courts. Probably the easy way to defeat this court-packing scheme is for Trump to propose doing the same thing now.  It would lead to Democrat denunciations and claims that it would be wrong, thereby blowing up any attempt by them in the unfortunate event of Democrats winning a presidential election.
Read more

29 % of companies say they are unlikely to keep insurance after Obamacare

Conn Carroll: A new survey of 368 midsize to large companies found that 29% of them are considering terminating their active employee health care plans when Obamacare is full implemented in 2014. Only 71% of employers surveyed said they did not expect to drop their health coverage, while 20% said they did not know and 9% said they were planning to exit. The latest survey, conducted by Towers Watson, echoes an ealier survey by McKinsey & Co. finding that 30% of private-sector employers were planning to drop their employee health insurance coverage by 2014. When the Congressional Budget Office crunched Obamacare's spending numbers, they estimated that only 7% of employees currently covered by employer-sponsored plans would lose their plans. ... This means the cost of the health care fiasco will be hundreds of billions more than estimated by the CBO and Congressional Democrat. It is also clear that Obama's pledge that you could keep your health care plan if you wanted t
Read more