Admittedly, this isn’t exactly shocking stuff. Wal-Mart has been praised for being one of the only retailers to continue posting earnings that surpass estimates. But praise hasn’t given them higher share prices since the crash in October.

As you can see, Wal-Mart’s been dropping since last October. But interestingly enough, WMT has managed to hold above its October lows.

This combined with the fact that both the RSI and Slow Stochastic are showing WMT as oversold means that buyers should rush in and push WMT share prices higher.

For the traders out there – go long and place a stop @ $47 per share. If all goes as planned, WMT should rise over 10% in the next 30 days.

And although you hear about layoffs, most people simply don’t understand the scope of these layoffs. That is until now…

This is a chart of Initial and Continued Employment Claims which I grabbed from www.calculatedriskblog.com.

As you can see, continued jobless claims have now eclipsed the peaks we saw during the mid-70’s and early-80’s recessions. Yet we are still expected to continue seeing heavy job losses throughout the remainder of the year.

There’s no way you can expect consumer spending (which makes up 70% of GDP) to rebound until jobs start being created again. That means high-end retailers like Macy’s (NYSE:M) which used to see a lot of sales from the middle-class over the past few years, should continue to see shares slide as the middle class tightens up and starts shopping at places like Wal-Mart (NYSE:WMT) instead.

Amazon remains the proverbial 800-pound gorilla in the online retailing space. And business is both healthy and growing. But the company is counting on a whole new series of technology-based ventures that will provide the real fuel that will put this stock into orbit. Let’s take a closer look.

Just last Thursday, in yet another positive “surprise” that Wall Street missed predicting, Amazon annihilated analysts’ earnings estimates by announcing a big jump in fourth-quarter profits and told investors even better days are ahead.

Fourth-Quarter Fireworks

In a financial-crisis environment in which there is supposedly no financing available, in which massive job cuts and huge job worries are causing consumers to cut way back on their spending, in which all retailers – even vaunted discounter Wal-Mart Stores Inc. (NYSE: WMT) – face huge challenges, Amazon actually increased its sales and profits.

In fact, Amazon’s fourth-quarter net income rose a hefty 9%. And not only did its per-share earnings of 52 cents blast through the Wall Street consensus of 39 cents by a full 33%, the company actually boosted its first-quarter outlook, stating that it expected sales to be stronger than analysts were predicting.

For the fourth quarter, Amazon’s sales advanced 18%, beating analysts’ expectations by about 4%. Sales actually would have grown by 24%, were it not for the strengthening of the U.S. dollar.

International sales were even stronger, and now account for a full 45% of Amazon’s overall sales.  One notable category was electronics and general merchandize advanced 31%, and that category now accounts for 43% of worldwide sales.

One particularly noteworthy achievement was in the area of gross margins, which suffered almost no damage – in spite of a U.S. recession that’s forcing most retailers to discount heavily. Amazon’s gross margins barely budged, dropping from a fairly remarkable 20.6% to a still-enviable 20.1%.

Remember, this outlook and performance is taking place in a market environment where there’s very little “visibility” – meaning company executives have almost no ability to predict what the market will look like next month, let alone in the next quarter or for next year. That’s forced a lot of companies to discount heavily, and is a key reason that a large number of firms have stopped issuing “forward guidance.”

But not Amazon: It continues to provide guidance – and then to exceed those expectations.

How is the company making this happen? These results point to strong market-share gains for Amazon and to new lines of business being introduced, which are powering the stock higher.  But, before we go deeper into Amazon, let’s consider the economic backdrop, in order to fully appreciate magnitude of Amazon’s accomplishments.

Anatomy of a Meltdown

In my 25-year investment career, I have seen countrywide market meltdowns like the one we’re struggling through perhaps every two or three years.  The hallmark of these crises has been an implosion of the banking system, which has then brought the entire economy down, as well.

In an effort to provide some context – and perhaps some reassurance to U.S. investors – let me say that I’ve seen much worse than what we are seeing in the United States right now. For instance, there are actually cases where all of a country’s banking deposits are either frozen (Argentina 2002) or lost outright (Russia 1998).

In each of those cases, there were two constants:

• From a business standpoint, the strong got stronger as their weaker rivals foundered and failed, allowing them to pick up market share and sometimes to even buy those smaller or weaker rivals.
• From a stock-market-valuation standpoint, however, the strong were initially equally punished in terms of their market valuations as the broader equity markets blew up, meaning their valuations didn’t reflect the much-brighter outlooks for them as stronger market leaders. However, when the market outlook brightened, those stronger firms saw their valuations surge with a vengeance and soar to new heights.

The lesson from each of those crises – from Brazil and Argentina, to more than 10 countries in Asia and in Russia – was that every single country made it back.
This was even true for those countries shackled with inferior policy mixes.  Some might say that Japan – with its “lost decade” – never came back.  This would be an imprecise statement, since Japan’s gross domestic product (GDP) growth was above 2.0% for the two years prior to the crisis and unemployment for the last five years has been between 3.45 % and 4.5%
But what is true is that while even countries with inferior policy mixes eventually made it back, it took a lot longer for that to happen. The speed of their comebacks can be traced to the degree in which the policies implemented made them:

• Open-market oriented, especially with regards to foreign capital.
• A lower-taxation environment.
• Strongly fiscally disciplined – for the long term – because the governing body addressed such serious structural economic problems as imbalances in both the social security and health-care systems.
• Less constricted by regulation.
• More transparent, in both the private and public sectors, especially in cases where the public sector overhauls led to a more democratic governing process.
• More-consensus oriented, particularly when that consensus included support for all the changes I’ve listed here.

While we are not seeing an unequivocal embrace of these tried-and-true recipes by the newly installed Barack Obama administration, mainly because of a bias toward big government, we are seeing an open-minded attitude and some movement in this direction.  And we will have to monitor this closely, because history shows us repeatedly that there are no half measures when it comes to successful economic and financial reform – and because market investors know this and will therefore be watching closely.

Forewarned is Forearmed …and Other Axioms to Live By

This background is important, for we now know that we can expect to see some once-in-a-generation buying opportunities in companies that can navigate this slowdown and position themselves for a massive subsequent rebound.

We also have to remember that his rebound won’t be immediate. But when it does come, that rebound will be huge for the companies that have used this time to buttress their already-leading market position. They’ve capitalized on consolidations in their respective industries or market sectors, and have certainly grabbed market share away from their rivals. The maximum gains will be realized only if financial prudence prevails in the public sector.

Is that happening here in the U.S. market?

Well, we’re about to pass a huge stimulus – perhaps as much as $1 trillion or more, when all is said and done.

There’s an old axiom about government stimulus packages: When money is spent, the economy grows. The key, however, is at what cost and who pays for it. So the short-term “steroids” effect of the stimulus has to be measured against the long-term weight its costs will exert of future growth.  But, ahead of that steroids injection, investors need to invest in the beneficiaries.
A much-repeated market axiom states that  “no one buys at the bottom, and no one sells at the top.” Much like no one was – or will be – ringing a warning bell at the market bottom, no one was ringing a bell at the top a year and half ago.  And nobody will be letting you know which of these companies will be thriving and which will be vanishing – because the investors who understand all this are very busy accumulating them for themselves right now.

So it is no surprise that Wall Street missed by a mile on iconic companies that are thriving, including International Business Machines Corp. (NYSE: IBM), Apple Inc. (Nasdaq: AAPL), United States Steel (NYSE: X), PMC-Sierra Inc. (Nasdaq: PMCS), Level 3 Communications Inc. (Nasdaq: LVLT), 3M Corp. (NYSE: MMM), Colgate-Palmolive Co. (NYSE: CL), Automatic Data Processing Inc. (NYSE: ADP), United Parcel Service Inc. (NYSE: UPS), Merck & Co. Inc. (NYSE: MRK), and many others.  And Wall Street always seems to miss to the downside in its estimates in these superb companies.

In the same way, Wall Street missed it with Amazon.  You see, Amazon survived the dot-com bubble because, unlike most of the start-ups, Amazon actually had a strong-and-viable business model.  In addition, starting with founder and chairman, Jeffrey P. Bezos, and continuing down through the rest of the organization, Amazon has in place a superb management team that has continued to carefully refine and build upon the company’s original vision, and has continued to execute almost flawlessly.

It’s not just the great value, convenience and solid customer service that contribute to Amazon’s results – it’s also innovation.

Those “Killer Apps” – “Cloud Computing” and the Kindle

Amazon first revolutionized the bookstore business. Then it revolutionized overall retailing. Now it’s aiming at the book-publishing business with its super-lightweight electronic reading device – called the Kindle. The Kindle allows you to buy and download books in less than a minute – from almost anywhere – without the need to connect to a computer or any device. Lots of books are available.

This is all possible because you are using the fastest wireless standard and the service is included in the price of the book you downloaded. And Kindle can hold some 200 books, newspapers and blogs and has free wireless access to Wikipedia.  The newspapers and blogs are downloaded automatically and updated instantaneously.  Kindle recharges in less than two hours and you can also email your own Word documents and pictures.

With all these features, I am seriously considering buying one. Here’s why:

• It will eliminate the need to walk down my long driveway to grab my copy of The Wall Street Journal every morning.
• It will be much easier to read than in my PC.
• All my downloads will stored in Amazon’s servers, just in case I lose or damage my Kindle.
• And it will save me countless trips to the library to pick up books for myself, and for my avid-reader daughters.

However, I’m going to wait until after Monday (Feb. 9), because Amazon has invited the news media to an event it has planned for the Morgan Library & Museum in New York City. The scuttlebutt is that Amazon could be announcing the “Kindle 2.0.”

By saving trees (reducing the need for paper) and eliminating the costs for printing, storage and delivery, publishers can reduce their costs considerably and pass part of those savings on to the consumer.  Therefore, the typical book will cost you $10 or less.  And you can even get some steals, like all sixteen novels by Charles Dickens in a single file, with an active table of contents – all for only 99 cents!

It’s incredible.  No wonder Kindle is expanding sales and margins for Amazon.

But Amazon’s “miracle” performance is not due just to the Kindle.  Amazon has jumped in on the fast-growing trend of “cloud computing.”  Now that the Internet has become ultra-fast, and is getting even faster – thanks to such hyper-fast, high-speed fiber-optic networks as the Verizon Communications Inc. (NYSE: VZ) FiOS broadband system – the balance has shifted towards centralized computing.

What this means is that with a relatively cheap computer and fast Internet access, one can perform most of the computational activities in the servers of somebody else.  So, somebody else will host the applications, store the data and perform the computation – for a fee, as it is accessed via the Internet.

Therefore, the need to maintain the storage and back it up, to keep your systems up to date and even to help prevent viruses is essentially transferred to the supplier of the service. This is especially important for individual users and small- and medium-businesses, which look to minimize all these costs.  But it is also very useful for some large enterprises in services where Amazon’s scale and expertise can deliver superior cost-savings and reliability.

Amazon aims to be a major player in this realm. Indeed, some analysts believe this could one day be the “real” Amazon business, with books and other retail goods serving only to bring folks in the door.

Amazon already provides storage, virtual private servers, elastic cloud computing, which gives developers a resizable capacity, content delivery and a number of other functions through its fast-growing cloud-computing activities.

This cloud-computing trend has also been embraced by Google Inc. (Nasdaq: GOOG), though Google Apps, and Yahoo! Inc. (Nasdaq: YHOO), which has forced Microsoft Corp. (Nasdaq: MSFT), which is built on the premise of distributed computing, to hedge by planning to offer a cloud computing operating system.  The new operating system will enable net books (barebones notebooks), PDAs and other smartphones to take full advantage of sophisticated computing capabilities and massive storage located in the “cloud.”

Clearly, cloud computing will be an explosive business, especially in Amazon’s focus areas of storage, content distributions and scalable computational capacity.

So, with book sales, electronics and its international efforts already strong and accelerating, and the probability of a Kindle 2.0 announcement now imminent, we need to jump on Amazon, while planning to keep the stock for several years.

Rocking With Retailing

Is this consistent with a sound investment strategy for retailing stocks in the current weak-economy market environment?

I recently saw a noted short-seller, who runs a very successful hedge fund (and you have to be good to be still alive), who indicated that for the first time in a long time, he saw opportunities to make money both on the long and on the short side.  This is encouraging, since for the year and a half prior to last November, the opportunities on the long side have been overwhelmed by the financial meltdown and massive de-leveraging.

In addition, this hedge fund manager was asking a renowned investor in retail stocks what opportunities he saw for shorting these stocks.  The reply: You have to be very careful – even in retailers, which were experiencing big problems – because, in his opinion, valuations had fallen way too much.

I agree with both assessments. At this point, there are good opportunities to buy, and in retail you want to go with the winners.

For all the reasons we’ve detailed to you, Amazon is that “winner,” the strong company with a rock-solid business model that delivers value to customers, that innovates, that has a clear focus on expansion, and that is producing results even in one of the worst economic periods since the Great Depression.

Recommendation:  Buy Amazon.com Inc. (Nasdaq: AMZN) before Monday’s product announcement and ahead of the rollouts of the stimulus packages planned by both the United States and China (**).

Source: Buy, Sell or Hold: Amazon Stock is Positioned as a Long-Term Winner

This begs the question, why would Circuit City want to emerge from bankruptcy? Best Buy is entrenched as the leader in the consumer electronics segment. Wal-Mart, which now carries name brand HD televisions at lower prices than Circuit City, is taking market share. Consumer spending on ‘luxuries’, such as big screen televisions has collapsed with the tightening credit markets.

How about the customer experience? When I recently went into a Circuit City store on a Saturday afternoon looking for an Ethernet cable, finding a sales associate was impossible. When I finally did locate one, they had no idea where to find the cable I needed. On top of that, I was one of perhaps a dozen customers in the entire store.

The cause of this poor experience is probably due to Circuit City laying-off approximately 3,400 sales associates last year and replacing them with lower paid workers. From my standpoint, and I am sure many others who have been to Circuit City lately, it is terrible shopping there. This doesn’t bode well going into the holiday season when retailers look for a boost in sales numbers.

I think perhaps it is time for Circuit City to call it a day and just cease operations. To re-emerge from bankruptcy in what is likely to be a continued economic slowdown and still facing eroding market share seems like a recipe for failure. There’s nothing wrong with knowing when to say when.

Source: Knowing When to Say When

The idea here is that while spending stocks like RV builders, boat retailers, and automakers struggle, companies involved in the basics will continue to do well… These companies sell things folks “have to have” rather than “want to have.”

The new highs in coal, natural gas, oil services, and agriculture companies show this trend at work. These are all basic industries that help produce food, fuel, and electricity. All are soaring right now. Also soaring is Wal-Mart – the ultimate destination for buying things we “have to have.”

Wal-Mart doesn’t sell $25,000 motorcycles or mega motor homes. Just the cheapest, most basic stuff in America. Sales are robust, and shares have gained 30% this year. As today’s chart shows, it’s a bull market in the basics.

Source: Another New High for the Ultimate Basics Stock

If you want free market commentary today, go over yonder to our colleagues at Money Morning, who have it all under contrarian control.

Back here at the western edge of the Great Plains and at the foot of the Rocky Mountains, there is a lot of empty retail space. Maybe it’s early in the summer shopping season. Maybe people are flying and driving less for vacation. Or maybe there’s just way too much retail space in America.

Either way, the whole geography of America’s strip mall retail network lends itself to huge booms and busts. And since we’re coming off a boom, this could be the bust. The architecture of the retail network offers you clusters of stores selling linens, patio furniture, $20 shoes from China, and huge quantities of chocolate. It all comes via truck, rail and container ship. And with global fuel prices high, it’s expensive to get things to the middle of the continent, a mile up from sea level.

But cheap energy convinces you that long logistics tails are merely matters of proper inventory management and just-in-time delivery. For the last fifty years, energy has trumped distance. That’s why America’s malls and stores are located in large residential developments which are themselves miles outside city centres. Fortress Wal-Mart.

Most of these future feudal outposts here on the Front Range of the continental divide were built by large national developers like KB Homes and Lennar. The homes are nice enough, with great views of the mountains. And they are conveniently located near grocery stores and shopping. But there are probably too many of them, and more still are being built.

They are not, we reckon, particularly well made. On the way to lunch today, our brother told us the Chipotle (a Mexican fast food joint serving enormous burritos stuffed with cheap calories) at Flat Irons Crossing Mall was vacant because the foundation had cracked. Other stores in the massive mall suffered the same fate. The mall is less than ten years old.

You wonder, with all the “For Sale” signs out front of these cookie cutter houses what these cul de sacs and neighbourhoods will look like in twenty years. Will people still live here and commute to work? Or will the whole economy of this particular living arrangement become a casualty of more expensive energy?

The word we used for it about six years ago was simple: Suburbistan. A place where the parts (copper wire, plumbing, wood frames) are worth more than the whole…empty tracts of houses built for people who couldn’t afford them with real money and which, in any case, are the ticky-tacky icons of a giant mis-allocation of the nation’s capital.

Right now, though, it’s not that bad. Times are tougher for sure. Good paying work is harder to get. This is a function of the globalisation of labour and free trade agreements. Jobs are created. But they aren’t the same jobs America created in the post-War boom of the 1960s and 1970s. They aren’t in manufacturing with high wages, lifetime employment, and defined benefit pensions (think General Motors).

The jobs created in America today pay lower wages and don’t come with a pension at all, unless it’s defined contribution scheme. New jobs come from services and retail (think Wal-Mart) and reflect the nation’s shift towards debt-based consumption and asset-based saving, neither of which lead to long-term capital formation. America is becoming a nation of window shoppers.

In fact, it’s evident now that capital is being either exported (as factories) or sold (as equity) to pay the bills (as debt). And that’s for the capitalists! For the workers and wage slaves, there is more job mobility, but less job security. Do you think it’s a good trade? How long before a clever politician begins appealing to the growing sense of resentment…and a desire for something “to be done” to someone?

The time is ripe on the national scene for a demagogue who appeals to America’s sense of injured pride and national greatness. That should be interesting to watch. Both Obama and McCain would fit the bill nicely, despite coming from opposite ends of the political spectrum. They share at least one belief in common: that State power should be used to shape people’s lives in whichever way the State chooses. America will be worse off with either way.

The country has huge fiscal and geopolitical challenges. It also still has a lot of nuclear weapons and, at least in Washington D.C., an exalted sense of its place in the world order. So much for American modesty, or walking softly and carrying a big stick for a rainy day. Watch out the anti-anti-American backlash.

Here in the mountains, Colorado has always been a bit of a boom-bust state. In the late 1970s and early 1980s it boomed with high oil prices. Natural gas drilling on the Western Slope boomed. Exxon Mobil opened a refinery in Parachute to turn oil shale into something like crude oil (kerogen). The U.S. Department of Energy even exploded a nuclear bomb underground near Rulison in Western Colorado to try and liberate stranded pockets of natural gas.

Nuclear mining! Lang Hancock would have loved it!

When oil prices crashed in the early ‘80s, Exxon shut the whole oil-shale retorting plant down. Who needs an alternative to crude when you have Prudhoe Bay, the North Sea, the Gulf of Mexico and Saudi Arabia? Oil prices stayed low for years and people resumed carefree consumption. National law makers went on a long holiday from serious thought and a realistic energy policy.

But hey, these things go in cycles. People have always been thoughtless and unprepared in the midst of great luxury. Same species, different century.

If you’ve lived through a bust, you don’t forget it and you never quite behave the same way because of it. The locals still refer to the day Exxon pulled the plug at Parachute as “Black Monday.” The massive housing development Exxon built for all the future employees at the facility became a retirement community known as “Battlement Mesa.”

In fact, the home-furnishings sector, as a whole, has lost 27.3% of its value in the last 11 months. It is also down 31.7% from its highest close, which occurred almost three years ago.

For some individual companies, it’s even worse…

On May 2, New Jersey-based Linens ‘n Things filed for bankruptcy, defaulting on $1.35 billion worth of debt. This may finally be a sign that the market is nearing its bottom.

Bankruptcies will lead to decreased supply (Linens ‘n Things has already announced it will close 120 stores) and less competition… two factors that should help the profit margins on the remaining retailers.

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As you can see, after getting killed in 2007, home-furnishing companies are finally stabilizing. The sector has risen 13% since March. And it’s cheap. The sector is trading at a 34.1% discount to its historical, median P/E.

But, while the sector is no doubt very cheap, a 13% rally is not enough to get me excited…

The sector may just be in a temporary upswing in an otherwise bear market. I wouldn’t feel comfortable getting into this sector until it tests its previous low. If it makes another downward move that fails to take it to new lows, then the worst is likely behind us.

At that point you could buy any of the companies I mentioned above – Target, Bed Bath & Beyond, or Tuesday Morning. Costco and Wal-Mart would also benefit from an upswing in the sector, as would upscale retailer Williams-Sonoma

Good investing,

Ian Davis

Source: These Beaten-Up Retailers Are Showing Signs of an Uptrend

From disappointed cavemen to chanting young people who have no shame, I’ve practically seen them all. But I’ve been noticing a little trend and its implications on the financial markets are huge. Let me explain…

The other day I saw a commercial for Dow Chemicals. They talked about how they are using more sustainable ingredients for their cleaning products. They’ve even started a new line of products touting these advancements (at a higher price, of course).

Let’s ignore the fact that the company is still pumping tons of pollutants into the air. The fact is, by making a small change, they can call themselves ‘green’.

Or how about commercials on how Honda and Ford are making huge strides in helping the environment and making the world a better place. Hmm, at least Honda isn’t being green because it’s in fashion. They’ve had one of the most fuel-efficient fleets for a long, long time. Ford, on the other hand, is turning green out of necessity (they won’t make money if their cars guzzle gas).

I swear, I’ve seen hundreds of commercials just like these. All that’s happening is that major corporations are doing some ‘brand’ repair. They know that if they look green in a world that’s moving in that direction, they’ll keep the brand image intact.

That’s not to say that going green is a bad thing, even if the improvement is small. But these companies are all making a far bigger deal than they should be.

As an investor, should you invest in a company that is greening?

Well considering green technology is still at its infancy, it is very expensive. Last time I checked, any company that spends too much doesn’t do very well in the stock market.

Granted, companies like Google and IBM (which have BILLIONS) can afford to turn their entire operations into self-sustaining powerhouses. But smaller companies simply can’t afford the big switch.

What’s the Benefit of Going Green?

So why does a corporation turning green even matter? If you’ve been a reader of my blog, then you’ll know exactly what this means.

There is something you should know about these new initiatives.

THEY ARE EXPENSIVE.

The cheapest solar panels – even after tax credits – cost about 20 cents per kilowatt-hour. Coal costs 5 cents. So for solar to compete effectively, prices have to drop by about 75%.

If you buy a hybrid car, it’ll take between 3-7 years for the extra cost of the hybrid to be recovered by fuel savings. If you buy solar panels, it could take even longer.

Now, I love the fact that the world is turning green. And I’ve said on previous occasions that I think the U.S. needs to speed up its adoption. But for major corporations and even you and me, what is the economic benefit in going green?

In Europe, the big benefit is that companies gain carbon credits that help them stay under emissions caps (and avoid those nasty fines). But in the U.S., the home of no comprehensive emissions reduction pact, lowering emissions only means added expense.

It doesn’t matter if Wal-Mart is willing to pay for an army of inspectors to go from state capital to state capital, letting governments know how to reduce energy usage. In the end, having that army of inspectors is going to hurt their margins and affect their profitability.

With no real economic incentive there, why the heck is turning green becoming such a cultural phenomenon? How is it that a solar company – which hasn’t generated an ounce of profits – can go on to skyrocket 200-300%?

I’ll talk in detail about this next week. Be sure not to miss it, because it’s going to give you a very clear direction for the next big growth market.

Until next time,

Charles P.S. I just started up a new blog and would love for you to check it out. Just go to http://stockcharlie.blogspot.com/. I’ll be giving you my unrestricted opinion on economic developments and the effect politics can have on the markets. Make sure to comment and let me know what you think!

Source: Green Is In… But Why?

Retail Sales Take a Dive

Many commentators, looking for a bullish lifeline, have pointed to the fact that retail sales grew in April by 1.8% over this time last year. But that is truly grasping at straws. Just last November they were growing at 6% year over year and have been dropping relentlessly for the last six months. And as good friend and data maven Greg Weldon points out, retail sales last November were 1.3% over inflation and now are a negative 2.1% below inflation. Retail sales are clearly headed down. (www.weldononline.com, a must-read for those who need in-depth analysis of all things and data economic)

But there was growth. Gasoline sales were up 16.3%. And food sales were up 6.1%. 77% of the increase in retail sales this year has been from increases in food and gas sales. If you take out food and gas, retail sales are down by about 2% in the last three months.

The consumer is getting squeezed. Reuters did a rather anecdotal, but revealing survey of Wal-Mart buyers at the beginning of the month. They found a significant increase in store traffic from the end of the month to the first of the month. Surveys showed that shoppers were stretched on their budgets due to rising gas and food costs and simply had to wait until their monthly checks came to go to the store for food. Many indicated they had changed their buying habits, now shopping at lower-cost stores like Wal-Mart.

At the Mauldin household I must admit to a kind of food shock upon my return. I eat a lot of smoked turkey from a local grocery deli. Arriving back from South Africa last night, I sent my oldest son to the store to put in a supply for the next few days. My “regular” turkey that was about $5.99 a pound a few months ago is now selling for $8.99. That is considerably higher than the 5.9% food-at-home inflation rate that the folks who give us the CPI tell us is the case. Next time I will find a less expensive brand, as the Reuters survey suggest shoppers all across the country are doing.

(I do recognize the inconsistency of saving a few dollars at home while I eat out at nice restaurants where the price increases are even greater. It is all about what is in your head. There are books and massive studies devoted to such behavior.)

“Leslie Dach, executive vice president of corporate affairs and government relations at Wal-Mart, said the cycle of shoppers running out of money in between paychecks and then flocking to its stores on payday is ‘more pronounced, more visible.’

While many U.S. retailers are facing waning sales as shoppers cut back on purchases of clothes, jewelry or home furnishings, Wal-Mart’s vast grocery business and its emphasis on low prices is spurring a resurgence at its U.S. stores and in its stock price.” (Reuters)

But prices are actually up at Wal-Mart. And not just from food. Looking at the latest Commerce Department data, we find that US import prices are up 15% year over year. Even taking out gasoline, prices are up 6.2%. And it is somewhat surprising that it is only 6.2%. Why?

Because the dollar has fallen by more than 6%. The Chinese ambassador to the US, Mr. Zhou Wenzhong, recently pointed out that the Chinese renminbi has appreciated almost 19% since July of 2005. I have been writing for years that the Chinese would allow their currency to appreciate slowly and steadily for their own purposes and on their own schedule. They need to do so in order to contain their own rising inflation. Look for it to rise another 10% by the middle of next year.

Consider that because of the rise of the renminbi, the prices for oil and food imports in China have risen 20% less than for US consumers. And the prices they charge us for their goods are only about 4% higher. But that meager growth is up from only 1% last fall. Those (notably economics-challenged Senators Schumer and Graham) who have been pressing for China to allow its currency to rise are going to find that such a rise ultimately means higher prices for US consumers. Be careful what you wish for, Senators. You just might get it.

Lower consumer spending is not just due to gas and food. There is also a psychological component. Frederic Mishkin, one of Ben Bernanke’s colleagues at the Fed, has done research that suggests the “typical American family will cut its spending by up to 7 cents for every dollar in housing wealth it loses. Given a 20% fall in prices, this adds up to a nationwide reduction in consumer spending of about $350 billion a year, or 2.5% of the U.S.’s gross domestic product. That’s a big number – more than enough to tip the economy into recession.” (Conde Nast)

And that’s if the fall in prices is only 20%. I continue to put forth the proposition that we are going to see a slow Muddle Through Recovery, as the boost we got from Mortgage Equity Withdrawals during the last recession will not be available this time.

Accounting for Inflation

If beauty is in the eye of the beholder, inflation is in the eye of the statistician. Because the number you end up with is dependent on the models and assumptions you choose. As the chart below shows, there have been two major revisions to how inflation is figured, one in 1983 and another in 1998. (Thanks to Barry Ritholtz at The Big Picture for this source.)

Note that using the same methodology as was used in 1983, inflation would be around 11.6% today. Before 1983, the BLS used actual home prices to account for inflation. After that time, they used something called Owners Equivalent Rent or OER. This is the theoretical price a home would rent for. There are sound reasons to use OER and equally good reasons to use actual home prices (as is done in Europe). But both methods have flaws. You just have to pick a methodology and stick with it.

And there are reasons to think that OER may not rise as it would normally do in this part of the cycle, because so many homes which cannot sell are being rented out, and rent prices might not rise as much as in past cycles.

Net sales for the Bentonville, Ark.-based company were $94.1 billion, a 10.2% increase from last year’s $85.4 billion. Net income rose 6.9%, or $2.8 billion, and diluted earnings per share clocked in at 76 cents.

“Our business is even more relevant to our customers today, given the current economic pressures,” Chief Executive Officer H. Lee Scott said in a company statement.

In a prerecorded call, Scott also acknowledged that the retail giant faces “uncertainties about the rest of the year.”

Stateside, U.S. sales rose 6.6% and Sam’s Club sales rose 7.6%, as each franchise reduced prices to draw traffic in the face of consumer spending strains. Higher food and gasoline costs drove customers to find the cheapest prices for those and other items such as clothing and prescription drugs.

“The consumer is getting squeezed right now,” Jim Wright, chief investment officer of Harvest Financial Partners, which owns Wal-Mart shares, told MarketWatch. “More and more consumers are going to look for good deals. Wal-Mart does a pretty good job at that. This is an environment where they should outperform.”

However, revenue from its international stores, which now makes up a larger piece of Wal-Mart’s pie, accounted for more than one quarter of the company’s sales.

Every penny of that will be leaned on for the second quarter. Wal-Mart is forecasting comparable store sales increases in the United States to be between flat and 2% and earnings per share between 78 cents and 81 cents for the second quarter. However, Thomson Reuters analysts estimated that Wal-Mart would post 81 cents earnings per share in the second quarter.

“In this environment, I don’t think you’d want to go” higher with the forecast, Joseph Feldman, managing director at Telsey Advisory Group, said in a Bloomberg Television interview. “It makes sense you’d be cautious.”

Wal-Mart’s shares were down slightly in midmorning trading following its earnings release, and one analyst sees it as an opportunity.

“Wal-Mart had a nice quarter,” Michael Binger, a portfolio manager for Thrivent Financial for Lutherans, told Bloomberg Television. “In reality, in this environment, it was a great quarter. I would be a buyer on this dip.”