The U.S. government this week reported a 0.8% rise in November retail sales, yet our country's largest electronics retailer Best Buy just reported third quarter same store sales down 3.3% from one year ago!
Are you trying to make sense out of U.S. government reported retail sales and other economic statistics? The U.S. government's economic reporting has now reached a whole new level of unreliability!
The truth is, U.S. retail sales are rising solely due to inflation (the bulk of it coming from rising food and energy prices). Although the government's latest CPI numbers indicated annual price inflation of only 1.14%, these numbers were manipulated lower using deceptive seasonal adjustments, along with hedonics and geometric weighting. in fact the real U.S. price inflation is already north of 5% and is headed substantially higher in the first half of 2011.
