by Wolf Richter
Wolf Street
Atlanta Fed’s GDPNow Forecast Chills any leftover Q1 Optimism
In a very unpleasant and totally unnecessary move, the Census Bureau reported this morning that February sales by wholesalers, adjusted for seasonal variations and trading day differences, but not price changes, dropped 3.1% year over year to $427.6 billion.
This sales decline is largely in line with the overall sales decline among US businesses since late 2014. And businesses are finally taking the sales slump seriously and have begun whittling down their inventories. This has hit the Atlanta Fed’s GDPNow forecasts for the first quarter.