Last month, Americans spent more on flatscreens, lumber, watering cans, groceries, gas, clothes and restaurant food, but less on timing belts, chairs, ibuprofen, batting helmets, string instruments, books, online purchases and “miscellaneous.”

That’s a humorous (hopefully) summary of the category breakdown from Wednesday’s retail sales report, which showed overall, nominal spending flatlined in April.

The unchanged headline counted as a meaningful “miss,” with the scare quotes to denote that consensus is so often wrong that to mention it is to accidentally insult an economist, which feels gratuitous given the frequency with which economists are deliberately insulted.

The ex-autos print, at 0.2%, was in line, but the control group showed a 0.3% decline against estimates for a small gain. That’ll weigh on Q2 GDP estimates.

The release came packaged with revisions dating back years. The overall picture’s unchanged, but do note: We’re parsing these releases out to multiple decimal places and making investment decisions based on that exercise, knowing full well that revisions will eventually, in some cases, change the whole series, not just the last two months. Since the point of revisions is to make the data more accurate, the implication is that we’re trading today on relatively inaccurate data, and out to the fourth, fifth and sixth decimal. That’s an unholy union if I’ve ever seen one: The precision parsing of data everyone knows is mis-measured.

Anyway, Wednesday’s retail sales release suggests the consumption impulse in the US faltered at the beginning of Q2. When considered with the NFP undershoot, contraction-territory ISM prints, lackluster sentiment and the “cool” read on core CPI for April, the read-through for the Fed’s plainly dovish.

Suffice to say traders should fully price 50bps of cuts for 2024 by the end of the session. As of this writing, it’s ~49bps.

Maybe we have indeed seen “peak no landing.” If so, the challenge going forward will be to stay on the right side of the blurry line between a soft landing and a hard landing.