{"id":197975,"date":"2007-12-27T06:07:00","date_gmt":"2007-12-27T11:07:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2007\/12\/27\/retail-sales-fall-during-christmas-season-but-innumerate-reporters-miss-it\/"},"modified":"2007-12-27T06:07:00","modified_gmt":"2007-12-27T11:07:00","slug":"retail-sales-fall-during-christmas-season-but-innumerate-reporters-miss-it","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2007\/12\/27\/retail-sales-fall-during-christmas-season-but-innumerate-reporters-miss-it\/","title":{"rendered":"Retail Sales Fall During Christmas Season, But Innumerate Reporters Miss It"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Once again the inestimable  Nouriel Roubini <a href=\"http:\/\/www.rgemonitor.com\/blog\/roubini\/234146\">catches something that all the major news outlets missed<\/a>, though in this case, it ain&#8217;t rocket science<sup>*<\/sup>:  since inflation is running now above 4%, an year over year increase in sales of 3.6% is actually a <b>decrease<\/b> in sales.<\/p>\n<p>Both the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2007\/12\/26\/business\/26shop-web.html?ex=1356325200&amp;en=958ad9b6ee53d9b4&amp;ei=5090&amp;partner=rssuserland&amp;emc=rss\">New York Times<\/a> <b>and<\/b> <a href=\"http:\/\/online.wsj.com\/article_print\/SB119859964475049505.html\">The Wall Street Journal<\/a> get this wrong.<\/p>\n<p><sup>*<\/sup><span style=\"font-size:85%;\">Full Disclosure, in 1999-2000 and 1996-1998, I worked as a mechanical engineer for what is now Lockheed Martin Missiles and Fire Control, and I have some claim to actually being a rocket scientist.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Once again the inestimable Nouriel Roubini catches something that all the major news outlets missed, though in this case, it ain&#8217;t rocket science*: since inflation is running now above 4%, an year over year increase in sales of 3.6% is actually a decrease in sales. Both the New York Times and The Wall Street Journal &hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[973,1064],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-197975","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economy","category-media"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/197975"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=197975"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/197975\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=197975"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=197975"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=197975"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}