Here’re some business cycle indicators with deflated retail sales:
Figure 1: Civilian employment adjusted to NFP concept smoothed population controls (bold orange), manufacturing production (red), ADP private nonfarm payroll employment (light green), real retail sales, CPI deflated (black), freight services indexes (brown), and coincident index in Ch.2017$ (pink), GDO (blue bars), all log normalized to 2025M01=0. Source: BLS, ADP via FRED, Philadelphia Fed, Bureau of Transportation Statistics, Federal Reserve via FRED, BEA 2026Q1 2nd release, and author’s calculations.
While CPI deflated retail sales rebounded, a little disaggregation to ex-auto, ex-parts, ex-gasoline shows some deceleration over the last two months.
Figure 2: Retail sales ex-auto, ex-gasoline stations, in mn$/mo (blue), in mn2025$/mo (red), both s.a. Deflation using core CPI. Source: Census via FRED, BLS, and author’s calculations.
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