Bloomberg has obtained emails from Wal-Mart where an executive calls Feb sales a ‘total disaster’
“In case you haven’t seen a sales report these days, February MTD sales are a total disaster,” Jerry Murray, Wal-Mart’s vice president of finance and logistics, said in a Feb. 12 e-mail to other executives, referring to month-to-date sales. “The worst start to a month I have seen in my ~7 years with the company.”
Executives blame the weakness on the expiration of the payroll tax break and delayed tax returns.
This flies directly in the face of the recent commentary about improvement in the US economy. An unexpected Q1 slowdown in the US consumer would hurt CAD and could take the wind out of trades that benefit from less QE, like USD/JPY longs and gold shorts.
I would classify this as big news and it’s not getting much traction right now because it’s coming out late on a Friday afternoon. Wal-Mart probably has the best real-time data on the US economy.
