Looks like holiday sales were ho-ho-ho-hum

DESPITE all the early hoopla about how great this holiday shopping season would turn out, it hasn’t worked out that way.

In fact, even all the money made in the Donald Trump stock market rally that started with the Presidentelect’s Nov. 8 victory hasn’t made Christmas spending good again.

That’s what happens when “experts” base their opinions on misleading government statistics.

I hate to wear out a theme, but faulty data coming out of Washington led people to believe Christmas sales would go gangbusters. Even the National Retail Federation said in October that the holiday season would see a strong 3.6 percent in sale gains.

That would have been better than the 2.5 percent annual average over the last 10 years. The retail organization’s optimism led a major financial magazine to run a headline: “Christmas Sales Are Expected to Be Strong This Year.”

Unfortunately, someone forgot to tell consumers, who are still struggling with small pay increases, no hikes in Social Security payments, little interest income on their savings, poor job growth and gains in stock prices that are hard to liquidate to buy Christmas presents.

It’s too early to tell how retailers are doing this Christmas, since the first sales report won’t hit until early January. But early indications aren’t good.

Discern Retail Insights, one of the Wall Street firms that tracks the industry, says “a modest post-election bounce in consumer spending intentions has since faded.”

Discern said its survey results in December “dipped from the November results across the board. ... (And) the results point to a small increase in consumer spending for the holiday this year.”

RS Metrics, which uses satellites to monitor the number of cars in mall parking lots, is seeing much the same trend. November traffic in the lots was about 3 to 4 percent higher than last year but December is down 2 to 2.5 percent.

A lot of things affect consumer spending, but the biggest is how much money people have.

I told you last month about two government surveys that were misleading the experts — including, apparently, retailers — into thinking Americans were flush.

One showed a surge in household income. But if you looked closely enough — which I did — you noticed that income was up strong mainly because the government was counting withdrawals from retirement accounts as if they were wages.

People don’t usually withdraw money from retirement accounts to buy Christmas presents.

And when the Census Bureau announced a healthy increase in sales for October, I pointed out that most of the gain was the result of guesswork and “imputations” that could be making the retail situation look better than it really was.

Not surprisingly, this is the sort of concocted optimism you see from Washington right before presidential elections.

The election is over, so now Washington can go back to being a little more honest.

Last week, the Commerce Department reported that US consumer spending increased by a modest 0.2 percent in October.

And half of that gain was the result of higher prices — inflation — and wasn’t because people bought more.

All right, already! Get the damn Dow to 20,000 so we can stop hearing about it.

As my readers already understand, traders can push market indices up if they do concentrated buying in futures contracts. So the Dow Jones industrial average will undoubtedly get to 20,000 before long — whether stocks deserve to be at these levels or not.

But keep this in mind if you are on bubble-watch: Fundamentals like earnings matter. And corporate profits are expected to be down 5 percent when all third-quarter numbers are tallied. That’s with energy companies included. And earnings are down 2 percent without energy.

And if you eliminated the fancy accounting that companies are now doing, earnings would probably be down even more. Revenues may also be down. And if you anticipate future earnings, as Wall Street is apt to do, the market’s price-to-earnings ratio is a dangerously high 19.2–to–1. It’ll be even worse if those future earnings were calculated on a traditional Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP) basis and not on the trendy Hide the Bad News (HTBN) basis.

As I said before, it’s dangerous out there, even if Wall Street and CNBC wants you to think otherwise. An outfit called Reportlinker Insight argues that the drones are coming — and they will be welcomed by Americans. I’m not so sure myself. But I am ready to capture the first drone that attempts to deliver something to my house and hold it for ransom. But others seem less — what’s the word? — crazy than I am. Reportlinker says 47 percent of Americans are interested in drone delivery technology. Not surprisingly, men (53 percent) and people age 18 to 24 (72 percent of “millennials,” in the jargon of the day) are most interested in having their pizza or next Amazon Prime order plopped down at their doorstep by job-destroying drones. But if you buy a drone for personal use it could be delivered by a drone — and that seems appropriate.