Bad news. Or good news, depending on how you want to look at it. Retail sales just decelerated meaningfully in the US.

I don’t pretend to know how markets will trade or otherwise interpret the weakest read on nominal spending in 10 months, but in the context of recent data which suggested the world’s largest economy continued to defy the Fed’s efforts to cool things down in January, a demonstrably weak read on spending may help allay concerns about right-tail risk. That’s just a fancy term for the risk that policymakers are compelled to ponder more rate hikes.

Notably, revisions included in Thursday’s release suggest December’s spending impulse was less robust than originally reported, while November’s gain was revised away entirely. Now, the series shows a decline in three of the last four months.

January’s 0.83% drop was the largest decline since March, and was more than quadruple the expected decrease. The range of guesses from more than five-dozen economists was -1.2% to 0.3%.

The ex-autos print (a 0.6% decline), as well as the “less gas” reading (-0.5%) were big downside surprises. Consensus was looking for gains on both. Crucially, the control group showed a 0.4% drop against estimates for a small gain. That’ll weigh on previously buoyant Q1 GDP estimates.

Just four of 13 categories showed a gain for January. One of those four was food services and drinking places, the only services sector category in the release. Spending at restaurants and bars actually rose a healthy 0.7%.

It’s hard to know what to make of the numbers. I’m sure “severe weather” will get a mention in explaining the decline, although that doesn’t line up especially well with the decent read on restaurant sales. Maybe it’s just a holiday hangover.

Whatever it is (or was) it takes some of the sting out of the CPI overshoot from Tuesday, even as the macro doomsayer crowd will invariably shout “Stagflation!”

Jobless claims, meanwhile, undershot, as they’re wont to do. Initial claims fell 8,000 to 212,000 in the week to February 10. Consensus expected 220,000. Continuing claims for the prior week were 1.895 million, up 30,000 and ahead of estimates. You can still make a recession case with ongoing claims, but the initial filers series argues for a resilient labor market, and that’s the narrative that’ll prevail until the NFP headline suggests otherwise.

All in all — and writing off the regional Fed surveys as useless noise — Thursday’s data suggested the American consumer, laboring under $1.13 trillion in high-interest credit card debt (with delinquencies rising fast), might’ve begrudgingly retrenched in January. Even as there’s scant evidence of the US labor market breaking.