What Are U.S. Retailers Getting for Christmas This Year?

摘要

There was a bit of good economic news recently with the announcement that U.S. retail sales rose 0.8 percent in July. That was the biggest gain since February, and well above the 0.3 percent that economists had predicted. So is the economy finally recovering? Not so fast. Unemployment, while staying safely below the October 2009 peak of 10 percent, rose 0.1 percentage points to 8.3 percent, despite the addition of 163,000 jobs. Business spending is still weak, and bank lending is lower than it was during the Great Depression of the 1930s.