Financial FAQs
“Retail trade sales were up 0.6 percent (±0.5 percent) from October 2025, and up 3.1 percent (±0.5 percent) from last year. Nonstore retailers were up 7.2 percent (±1.2 percent) from last year, while food service and drinking places were up 4.9 percent (±1.8 percent) from November 2024.” US Census Bureau
Retail sales were choppy in 2025, to say the least. Even the slight uptick in November after two months of contraction won’t stop President Trump’s wholesale destruction of the U.S. economy.
Sales declined or were barely positive in six of 11 months through November 2025, per the FRED graph of monthly retail sales and the future doesn’t look brighter for most Americans.
Suffering consumers and businesses have tried every which way to avoid the higher prices from Trump’s TACO tariffs (Trump Always Chickens Out) that can change on a whim and cause consumers to pull back their spending in the face of sharply rising prices caused in large part by Trump’s economic policies.
Or avoid rising insurance costs because Republicans won’t subsidize insurance premiums for some 20 million low-income Americans.
We report retail sales because it comprises approximately half of consumer spending and consumers support some two-thirds of economic growth. So consumer behavior is closely watched by economists attempting to predict the future.
But President Trump’s single-minded policy of levying import taxes on most of the world by fiat—to lower the trade gap between imports and exports which he claims is unfair—is not a good way to do business or run a country. And it continues the wholesale destruction, both at home and of our foreign alliances.
Take Trump’s return to “Drill baby drill” policies, for instance, that are not only causing Detroit automakers to lose $trillions in having to switch back to combustion engines but make more people sicker from the increased air pollution that we thought we had conquered with the EPA’s Clean Air Act.
Ford Motor has just announced a $19.5 billion charge to restructure its EV (Electronic Vehicle) and GM $7.6 trillion in losses over the past two quarters because of Trump’s war against electric vehicles, losses from higher tariff taxes on parts that go into its manufacture and removal of purchase incentives to buy EVs.
It’s hardly a surprise that many of Trump’s executive orders are ad hoc; not only meant to pay for the huge tax cuts in the Big Beautiful Tax Bill that have run up a record federal debt but to coerce our allies to pay for his empire building, such as levying 25 percent tariffs on NATO members that say they will protect Greenland from military seizure.
The question will be can consumers continue to shop in the face of so much chaos, with fewer entering the workforce? Less the half the number of jobs are being created monthly since last Fall’s government shutdown.
The Fed’s January Beige Book on the current state of our economy summed it up. Rising costs are the main elephant in the room.
“Cost pressures due to tariffs were a consistent theme across all Districts. Several contacts that initially absorbed tariff-related costs were beginning to pass them on to customers as pre-tariff inventories became depleted or as pressures to preserve margins grew more acute.”
Consumers are becoming very nervous in the face of such an unknown future, a future that depends on the actions of a man who can willfully destroy an economy to further his own interests.
Harlan Green © 2026
Follow Harlan Green on Twitter: https://twitter.com/HarlanGreen
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