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Technology Stocks : Applied Materials No-Politics Thread (AMAT) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Proud_Infidel who wrote (4659)	12/27/2002 9:24:24 AM
From: Road Walker	Respond to of 25522

From Briefing.com: Holiday Sales : The Wall St Journal yesterday: "Retailers Fear Weakest Sales In Decades as Final Rush Fades". This may seem trivial to some, but is it too much to ask for accuracy in the headlines of the nation's leading financial newspaper? Or for that matter, can anyone in the US media get it right, or must their campaign for economic illiteracy continue unimpeded? Our first complaint: regardless of the specifics of late December sales figures, we can confidently state that sales will absolutely, positively not be the weakest in decades. The year/year rate of growth in sales for the holiday season might be the lowest in decades, but the actual level of sales will most likely hit a record high in 2002. But you probably didn't read that in yesterday's holiday sales summaries. (Of the many newspaper, TV, and radio reports we saw yesterday, only a British business program understood the distinction between the growth rates and the level of sales.) As for the growth of sales over last year's holiday period, there are two issues that leave open the question of just how weak sales growth really was. First, everyone is discussing nominal growth rates. With consumer goods price inflation near its lowest rate in decades, it would stand to reason that nominal growth in holiday sales was likely to come in at the low end of the historical range even without help from a sluggish economy. In real (inflation-adjusted) terms, we would bet that this holiday season will not be the weakest in decades. We are also left to wonder how we can already conclude that the holiday season has been so weak when it is not even over yet. A spokesman for the National Retail Federation told the WSJ yesterday that sales in the last week of the year account for 10% of all holiday sales, and it appears that holiday sales get more back-end loaded every year. We would not venture so far as to say that this final week will be good enough to produce strong results for the holiday period, but it does seem a bit premature to write the season off as the weakest in decades. It will be interesting to see how Nov/Dec retail sales figures look when the books are finally closed on the 2002 holiday season. We suspect that it will ultimately go down as a somewhat disappointing season, but that it will clearly not be the weakest in decades in absolute terms and quite likely will not be the weakest in terms of real growth. As we have been arguing for months, the US is in the midst of a frustratingly slow economic recovery. In this environment, a similarly sluggish holiday sales season is no great surprise. It is also not the precursor for the collapse of the consumer. It is simply more of the same - modest real growth in consumer spending that underpins the economy and is misreported by the US media. - Greg Jones, Briefing.com