Retail Sales Growth Begins to Falter
The National Retail Federation could hardly have been more optimistic over the course of the holiday season. It raised its forecasts for November and December substantially in early December. The thrill has faded, though. The NRF now expects retail sales to be only 3.4%…
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The NRF claims that the housing problem will be the largest drag on consumer activity. Some economists believe that the effects of the home market collapse will be “decoupled” from consumer activity this year. That is, people have come to accept the drop in the value of their homes and will no longer allow that problem to drive their consumer behavior, these experts say. The retail association now says that is not so.
The NRF forecast is a reminder that the consumer may not be able to forget the housing problem. Perhaps that is because home prices have not stabilized. There is still a threat that home price reductions, which have averaged more than a third nationally since 2006, could get even worse this year and next.
Consumer activity remains two-thirds of GDP. The national economy cannot grow much without a consumer who is willing to shop. Today’s consumer apparently is not.
Douglas A. McIntyre
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Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.
McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.
His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.
A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.
TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.
McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.
