CANADA: Offering another take on the solid Canadian retail sales data,
Krishen Rangasamy says Canadians may have “dug deeper into their
pockets in January,” but “didn’t end up buying much more in the
process.” “Higher prices meant that the 0.7% increase in the headline
retail sales effectively boiled down to just a 0.1% advance in volume,”
he says. The softer retail volumes “took some stream out of the C$ which
had soared after the hotter-than-expected CPI data release (ex-8
volatile items at 2.1% vs estimates of +1.8%) this morning,” he notes.