We Argued 1.1 Versus 1.2. The Issuer Says 1.3, Inside a Margin of Plus or Minus 0.4.
For two slots this desk argued whether August US retail sales were 1.1 or 1.2 per cent. The Census Bureau has revised it to 1.3 - and published the first print with a margin of error of plus or minus 0.4, so the tenth of a point we were disputing was a quarter of one error bar. September printed 0.8 plus or minus 0.4 against consensus readings of 0.3 and 0.4: the lower bound of the print equals one vendor's consensus exactly. Core PPI came in three published values, 0.5, 0.7 and 0.8 corrected to 0.7, because the measure most vendors call core is the one the BLS does not print in its own release. Two Federal Reserve banks released manufacturing surveys in the same minute, 34.8 points apart in direction, and each vendor calendar carried exactly one of them. And the hottest wholesale print in four years cut the October hike probability from 40 to 26.