Consumerism! It’s a helluva thing.

America’s legions of incorrigible spendthrifts didn’t get the recession memo last month, when retail sales were much stronger than expected, according to the last of this week’s top-tier US macro data. (There are a couple of housing updates on deck, but those won’t move the STIR needle.)

Headline nominal spending on goods plus restaurant bills and bar tabs rose 1% from the prior month, more than double the expected gain and the strongest advance since the anomalous spike in January of 2023. Auto sales rebounded following an interruption tied to the CDK cyberattack.

The ex-autos and gas aggregate posted a 0.4% advance, considerably better than expected.

As usual, the most relevant takeaway from the release was the control group print. The 0.3% increase there was triple the marginal gain economists expected. That’ll factor into early Q3 GDP forecasting. 10 of 13 categories showed a gain.

The release should help allay growth concerns fanned by July’s job report. If there’s a recession afoot in the US, it wasn’t apparent in Thursday’s nominal spending update.

Nor, incidentally, did the allegedly imminent US recession manifest in higher jobless claims. Initial filers dropped again in the week to August 10. 227,000 on the headline was a 7,000 decline from the prior week, which was revised up, but only marginally.

As the figure shows, claims have fallen in three of the last four weeks. The four-week average fell for the first time since June.

The recession crowd didn’t get any help from the normally reliable continuing claims series either. It too showed a decline (for the week to August 3), even as the total — 1.864 million — is still loitering near the highest levels since November of 2021.

Bottom line: There wasn’t anything in Thursday’s US macro to validate dire economic forecasts. That should be good news, with the caveat that the odds of a 50bps cut from the Fed next month (versus 25bps) will diminish further in the presence of numbers like these. The consumer’s undeterred, apparently, and absent a negative NFP headline, nobody’s going to fret too much about the labor market until jobless claims rise above 250,000 and stay there.

These monetary policy “lags” are quite long.