Retail Sales and Supply Chain Stress Monitor - 2025-05-14

A little growth in retail sales, to new all-time highs. Ex-auto, inventories are as lean now as they were in the worst days of the pandemic. If tariffs or anything else threatens to induce a recession, there won't be any inventory-liquidations to accelerate it. The story is that everyone is stocking up ahead of tariffs, but there's simply no evidence for that in the retail data.