The reason we start off with the Retail Sales figures press release this morning is this old business school axiom that “Nothing happens until someone buys something…” It’s also why you should strike to be in sales as a career, because this is where the money is, in almost any industry you care to name.
If you want to get rich, sales is, near, as I can figure, the shortest ladder to the top.
We can talk more about this some other time, but with the sales figures this morning, it seems on point. Some of the highest returns in learning you can find are to be had from studying the fine art of selling. And no, it’s not hard, but people, in general have a fear of rejection and there is a good bit of that in sales. Once you get past the ego-slamming idea that not everyone is going to love you, what you find is the remaining few who do love you, can make you rich beyond dreams.
I guess that’s why there are so many “average” people in the work, right?
OK, so onto the press release:
The U.S. Census Bureau announced today that advance estimates of U.S. retail and food services sales for February, adjusted for seasonal variation and holiday and trading-day differences, but not for price changes, were $427.2 billion, an increase of 0.3 percent (±0.5%)* from the
previous month, and 1.5 percent (±0.9%) above February 2013. Total sales for the December 2013 through February 2014 period were up 2.3 percent (±0.5%) from the same period a year ago. The December 2013 to January 2014 percent change was revised from -0.4 percent (±0.5%)* to -0.6 percent (±0.2%).
Yes, boys and girls, it’s the auto industry that is keeping America on life support.
Don’t look at retail sales in isolation, though. The reason is that these figures are counted on a dollar basis and not on a units sold basis. The dollar figures are kicked all over hell’s half acre by a) the purchasing power of the dollar, b) inflation, c) taxes, d) supplier costs, and the list goes on from there.
Still, any port in a storm and the trend is something you adjust the trim of your financial sales to: When they start to fall, you look for safer harbor investments, and when in a rising trend, you can maybe think about growth stocks again.
The Markets
All of which gets us to how the world looks this morning, assuming your eyes are open enough to care.
Dow futures were up 30 – amazing what happen retail sales will do.
China and Japan were down again. And China is under the key 22,000 level on the Hang Seng, so if the weakness persists into next week there, even though there may be some happy talk about things like Ukraine, it might be interesting to look at the rest of the world before working yourself into a bullish frenzy.
Looking at Europe in the early going today, the tea drinking kneelers were down a bit, and the huns and frogs were up a tad. The inference is that no one in Europe has any clue what’s going on, but that should be evident from a quick glance at their shoddy system of government upon government…
I’m sorry, but when I look at the EU what I see is one of history’s cruelest jokes. What Napoleon, the Kaiser, and Hitler could not hold together, is now being bubble gummed and babble-mouthed by latter day empire builders. Only to have history make the point that 28 bankrupt countries are no better off than individual ones.
The whole point of the “trade deals” is that they provide the international bankster class with a kind of floating “check kiting” scheme which is fine, unless you live in Spain, Portugal, Cyprus, Greece,,,you keep a list, I hope?
One could argue that it’s 27 and a half in the EU fold, since the Brits haven’t swallowed the whole bait, yet. And it will soon be 28 and a half (or 29, depending on who’s scoring) when the mobgov of the Ukraine swallows the bait, which they will because they need loans and the old way to do that is to grovel to Brussels.
Which is why the power grab for Ukraine is so much like an addict’s “Just one more ounce/toke/drink” plea. Like one more is going to fix anything. It will seem to because here come the checks into the kiting pool, right? Circular refinance, mark up, oh, it’s such a clever machine!
More important than anything else, Ukraine gives member states something to jointly worry about and since external enemies are how taxes for arms have been historically stolen from the workers (who just want to be left alone) the resurrected Evil Russian Empire is marketing, marketing, marketing.
And shortly it will be tax, spend, tax, spend, which is how people in power stay there. Napoléon and the Kaiser should have been so clever.
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listen (help·info) (German for “habitat” or literally “living space“) was an important component of Nazi ideology in Germany. The Nazis supported territorial expansionism to gain Lebensraum as being a law of nature for all healthy and vigorous peoples of superior races to displace people of inferior races; especially if the people of a superior race were facing overpopulation in their given territories.[1] The German Nazi Party claimed that Germany inevitably needed to territorially expand because it was facing an overpopulation crisis within its Treaty of Versailles-designed boundaries that Adolf Hitler described: “We are overpopulated and cannot feed ourselves from our own resources”.[1] Thus expansion was justified as an inevitable necessity for Germany to pursue in order to end the country’s overpopulation within existing confined territory, and provide resources necessary to its people’s well-being.[1] The idea of a Germanic people without sufficient space dates back to long before Adolf Hitler brought it to prominence.