Unexpectedly!
“Retail Sales Fall for 3rd Month in a Row,” Rick Moran notes at the Tatler:
It’s the first time retail sales have fallen for three straight months since the end of 2008 and it’s just one more indication that the economy we have today is going to be the same, or very similar, to what we see on election day.
Americans reined in their spending for the third straight month in June, fueling fears that the economy is stalling after gathering steam early this year.
Retail sales dropped 0.5% in June, the government said Monday, falling short of the 0.2% rise that most economists were expecting. Retail sales haven’t fallen three months in a row since 2008. April’s figures were revised down.
Stocks dropped on the disappointing news. The Dow Jones Industrial Average slipped 43 points, or 0.3%, to 12,735, while prices of U.S. Treasury bonds rose as investors sought a safe place for their cash.
June’s sales were hampered by the recent drop in the price of oil, which reduces the dollar value of sales at gasoline stations. Normally, that is a good thing:
Falling prices at the pump should help the economy by putting more cash in consumers’ wallets and encouraging spending. Retail sales are an important part of overall consumer spending, which fuels two-thirds of America’s economy.
Unexpectedly, it didn’t take look to find plenty of “unexpectedlys” from the MSM:
When will bad economic news no longer be “unexpected” by the MSM? If and when Mitt Romney is sworn in as president come January.
QED.
(More “unexpectedlys” rounded up here.)
The media mush-mouths seem to have stopped using the term “unexpectedly” with regards to the unemployment numbers – apparently, the numbers have been bad so consistently that even economic illiterates have come to expect them. The fact that they’re now applying this word to retail sales numbers suggests they have all climbed up one deck on the sinking ship in search of something to cling to.
The only unexpected thing in an Obama economy would be sustained growth and improvement.
We can only hope for November 7 headlines of “Romney Unexpectedly Scores Landslide Win” in the same way Reagan unexpectedly won 40 states against Carter in 1980. But more likely if that were to happen, we would be seeing few “unexpectedly” headlines from the Deep Blue bastions, and more “Jesusland Shows its True Racist Colors” type screaming blurbs the day after the election.