US retail sales rise as wholesale inflation slows in December

US retail sales rebounded in the final month of 2016, but driven almost entirely by autos, while wholesale inflation slowed slightly in the world's largest economy, the government reported Friday.

Consumers spent the most since April for light trucks and cars, the Commerce Department report showed, but spending on anything besides autos was nearly flat.

The figures also pointed to a continuation of consumer trends in shopping, with online businesses seeing rising sales, while department stores moved fewer goods off the shelves.

On a seasonally adjusted basis, sales in retail and food services rose 0.6 percent in December to $469.1 billion, far faster than the 0.2 percent rise in November, but slightly below an analyst consensus forecast.

December sales were 4.1 percent higher than the same month in 2015, and sales for the whole year, were up 3.3 percent over 2015.

Motor vehicles and parts dealers saw the strongest monthly gains, with sales jumping 2.4 percent, the fastest monthly gain in eight months.

But excluding autos, retail sales grew at a far more tepid pace of 0.2 percent.

Non-store retailers -- such as online marketplaces and mail-order vendors -- saw gains of 1.3 percent but department stores went in the opposite direction, falling 0.6 percent in December.

Restaurants and bars also had a slump with business falling 0.8 percent, the biggest drop since January 2016.

In a separate report, the National Retail Federation said holiday retail sales in November and December rose four percent over the same period in 2015 to $658.3 billion, with "non-store" sales rising nearly 13 percent.

NRF President Matthew Shay said the numbers showed the current economic recovery was gaining pace and that "consumers feel good about the future."

An index of consumer sentiment published Friday by the University of Michigan fell slightly for January to a preliminary estimate of 98.1 after surging in December.

Ian Shepherdson of Pantheon Macroeconomics said the retail sales numbers from the end of the year could be subject to large revisions but questioned recent strong consumer confidence numbers.

"This might be nothing more than a question of lags but we wonder if the consumer confidence surveys do a relatively poor job of capturing the response to the election of young people, especially minorities, who voted heavily for Clinton," he wrote in a research note.

"It's hard to explain why headline confidence has jumped so much given that (President-elect Donald) Trump lost the popular vote by" three million ballots.

Meanwhile, the Producer Price Index, which measures prices from the seller's perspective, rose 0.3 percent in December, after a 0.4 percent rise in November, the Labor Department reported.

Excluding the more volatile categories of food and fuel, prices were up only 0.2 percent.

PPI for 2016 rose 1.6 percent over the prior year, the largest 12-month increase recorded since September 2014.

source: AFP