{"id":1566,"date":"2020-04-15T14:50:43","date_gmt":"2020-04-15T14:50:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/intv.pk\/coronavirus-delivers-record-blow-to-u-s-retail-sales-in-march\/"},"modified":"2020-04-15T14:50:43","modified_gmt":"2020-04-15T14:50:43","slug":"coronavirus-delivers-record-blow-to-u-s-retail-sales-in-march","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/intv.pk\/?p=1566","title":{"rendered":"Coronavirus delivers record blow to U.S. retail sales in March"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\"Coronavirus<\/div>\n
U.S. retail sales suffered a record drop in March as mandatory business closures to control the spread of the novel coronavirus outbreak depressed demand for a range of goods, setting up consumer spending for its worst decline in decades.<\/div>\n
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The Commerce Department on Wednesday said retail sales plunged 8.7% in March, the biggest decline since the government started tracking the series in 1992, after falling by a revised 0.4% in February.<\/p>\n

According to a Reuters survey of economists, retail sales were forecast to have fallen 8.0% last month.<\/p>\n

The report came as millions of Americans are thrown out of work, and strengthen economists’ conviction that the economy is in deep recession. States and local governments have issued “stay-at-home” or “shelter-in-place” orders affecting more than 90% of Americans to curb the spread of COVID-19, the respiratory illness caused by the virus, and abruptly stopping the country.<\/p>\n

“The economy is almost in free fall,” said Sung Won Sohn, a business economics professor at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles. “We will see the bottom when the coronavirus infection rates stabilize. It’s going to be a pretty deep bottom from which to come up.”<\/p>\n

The drag on sales in most retail categories from social restrictions far outweighed a surge in receipts at online retailers like Amazon (AMZN.O), and grocery stores and pharmacies as consumers stocked up on household essentials such as food, toilet paper, cleaning supplies and medication.<\/p>\n

Consumer spending accounts for more than two-thirds of U.S. economic activity. It grew at a 1.8% pace in the fourth quarter, with the overall economy expanding at a 2.1% rate over that period. Economists see no respite for consumer spending in the second quarter, with estimates as low as a 41% rate of decline, despite a historic $2.3 trillion fiscal package, which made provisions for cash payments to some families and boosted unemployment benefit checks.<\/p>\n

“In general consumer spending is going to look about as bad as it has ever been, although there will be some categories of resilience,” Tim Quinlan, a senior economist at Wells Fargo Securities in Charlotte, North Carolina. “The panic buying at grocery stores cannot offset the retrenchment in spending that we will see in other categories.”<\/p>\n

Economists believe the economy entered recession in March. The National Bureau of Economic Research, the private research institute regarded as the arbiter of U.S. recessions, does not define a recession as two consecutive quarters of decline in real gross domestic product, as is the rule of thumb in many countries. Instead, it looks for a drop in activity, spread across the economy and lasting more than a few months.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

U.S. retail sales suffered a record drop in March as mandatory business closures to control the spread of the novel coronavirus outbreak depressed demand for a range of goods, setting up consumer spending for its worst decline in decades. The Commerce Department on Wednesday said retail sales plunged 8.7% in March, the biggest decline since \u0645\u0632\u06cc\u062f \u067e\u0691\u06be\u06cc\u06ba<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1567,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1566","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-9"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/intv.pk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1566","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/intv.pk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/intv.pk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/intv.pk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/intv.pk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1566"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/intv.pk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1566\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/intv.pk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/1567"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/intv.pk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1566"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/intv.pk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1566"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/intv.pk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1566"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}