WASHINGTON (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 14th May, 2021) US retail sales turned flat in April after an increase of nearly 11 percent in March, according to data from the Commerce Department on Friday that took some heat off inflationary expectations in an economy recovering from the coronavirus pandemic.
"Advance estimates of US retail and food services sales for April 2021, adjusted for seasonal variation and holiday and trading-day differences, but not for price changes, were $619.9 billion, virtually unchanged from the previous month," the US Census Bureau, a unit of the Commerce Department, said in a statement.
Economists polled by US media had expected a 1 percent growth in retail sales for last month, sharply revising down their estimates from March, which saw an untoward jump in spending by Americans empowered by COVID-19 relief checks of $1,400 per person sent out by the Biden administration.
"The numbers are very close to expectations," economist Adam Button said in a post on ForexLive, commenting on the April data.
Notwithstanding the flat change month-on-month, the Census Bureau reported a 51.2 percent growth in retail sales in the 12-month period since April 2020, when the pandemic first broke out.
That was in line with the double-digit annual increase in the Consumer Price Index (CPI) and Producer Price Index (PPI) for April reported earlier this week by the Labor Department. The CPI grew by 4.2 percent over 12 months for its largest increase in almost 13 years, while the PPI expanded by 6.2 percent over the year, its most in a decade.
The spike came amid price pressures arising from bottlenecks in supply chains struggling to cope with demand in an economy reopening after months of pandemic-suppression.
The US economy shrank 3.5 percent in 2020, although first quarter data for 2021 showed a dynamic rebound of 6.4 percent. The Federal Reserve has forecast a 6.5 percent economic growth for all of 2021.
