🇺🇸❗️Cable FX Macro Weekly Note: U.S. August Retail Sales

**As seen in Risk In The Week report 09/13/25, get full access now!

Overall, retail sales showed resilience despite challenges like a softening labor market, rising tariffs, and higher goods prices, signaling a solid start to the third quarter. Total sales rose 0.5% month-over-month (m/m) from June 2025 (which was revised upward from 0.6% to 0.9%). This matched economists' expectations.

Economists at Commerzbank warned that US households therefore still have sufficient funds to increase their consumption. They now assume that (nominal) retail sales rose by 0.3% in August (consensus: +0.3%). Adjusted for price changes, they are likely to have remained unchanged. The turnover of auto sellers is likely to have fallen, as car sales declined by just under 3% to 16.1 million units (annualized) in August, they wrote. However, Commerzbank added that this figure is often quite volatile and, based on experience, does not translate 1:1 into a decline in sales calculated in dollars.