It was the first drop after four straight months of sales increases, though the gain in November slowed from October because of the lengthened holiday shopping season brought on by fears of product shortages and price increases.
Beth Ann Bovino, chief U.S.
“This is not a sign of consumer weakness,” said Ms. Bovino, who had forecast a decline.
The retail sales report provides a data point on the mind-set of consumers after a report this week showed that inflation climbed to its highest level in 40 years at the end of 2021.
1 concern for consumers it surveyed in November, that “came with no dent to spending plans,” they said in a note last week.
Instead, the holiday shopping season appeared to break records and lower-income consumers seemed to be operating with relatively better buying power, the economists wrote.
That was a slight improvement from the depths of the pandemic in 2020, when foot traffic was down 33.1 percent in the same period compared with 2019, but still a significant change.
They had already benefited during the pandemic by being able to remain open while others closed, from the variety of goods that they carry and through initiatives like curbside delivery.
“We’re talking about the Walmarts and Targets and Costcos, the big players,” said Mickey Chadha, a retail analyst at Moody’s Investors Service.
Costco, for example, said on a December earnings call that it believed it was successfully managing the effects of inflation through its relative purchasing power and its relationships with vendors.
“Holiday was weaker than expected as units that were slated to arrive in December did not clear through the ports in the time frame we had anticipated,” Fran Horowitz, chief executive of Abercrombie & Fitch, said at a conference on Tuesday.
Still, some retail executives have said that they would rather have a supply issue than a demand issue, particularly given the sharp ebbs and flows in consumer preferences in the past 18 months.
The bank, the country’s largest by assets, reported flat revenue compared with the final quarter of 2020, although profit fell 14 percent to $10.4 billion in the three months ending in December.
“The economy continues to do quite well despite headwinds related to the Omicron variant, inflation and supply chain bottlenecks,” Jamie Dimon, JPMorgan’s chief executive, said in a statement.
But there were also laggards: Profit for the bank’s consumer division, which caters to Main Street customers, fell 2 percent to $4.2 billion.
On Thursday, it announced a $3.6 billion sale of consumer operations in Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand and Vietnam to UOB Group.
Wells Fargo bucked the trend: Its fourth-quarter net income increased 86 percent to $5.8 billion, beating analyst expectations.
“Everybody seems to be getting more and more confident that the recovery is continuing,” Michael P.
Executives at the nation’s biggest lenders have been upbeat about the economy in recent months, particularly during periods that the pandemic ebbed.
The bank reached 99 percent compliance with its mandate before a Friday deadline, Sara Wechter, the bank’s head of human resources, wrote on LinkedIn on Thursday.
Citigroup announced earlier this month that unvaccinated employees would lose their jobs by the end of the month.
The bank has been more assertive than its Wall Street peers on the thorny issue of vaccines.
Those purchases pushed China’s trade surplus to its highest level ever last year, according to data released on Friday by the Chinese government.
Beijing has particularly focused on developing globally competitive manufacturing industries while importing mostly raw materials, so as to create as many well-paid jobs as possible within China’s borders.
Chinese officials on Friday applauded the latest trade data, saying that it fulfilled the country’s goals.
Trump concluded a Phase 1 trade agreement in January 2020 that called for a sharp increase in China’s imports from the United States in 2020 and 2021, followed by further increases from 2022 through 2025.
China will not release until Monday its full-year statistics on total economic output.
The White House plans to nominate Lisa Cook, an economist at Michigan State University who has researched racial disparities and labor markets, and Philip Jefferson, an economist and administrator at Davidson College, to open seats on the Fed’s Board of Governors.
If they are confirmed to their posts, the seven-person Fed board would have four women, one Black man and two white men — the most diverse team in the Fed’s roughly 108 years of existence.
The administration had promised to make the Fed — historically dominated by white men — look more like the public it served, and prominent lawmakers have pushed for a focus on tougher financial regulation.
The company said it would buy a building in London’s West End where it had already been leasing office space.
The world’s largest tech companies have used flush balance sheets to become major buyers of global real estate.
Shares of JPMorgan Chase and Citigroup fell sharply, after both firms reported trading revenue for the fourth quarter that was weaker than analysts had expected.
The reports mark the start of earnings reporting season, and analysts expect results from S&P 500 companies to show growth of 22 percent in the fourth quarter, from a year ago.
Friday’s early decline in stocks was relatively mild compared with some recent swings, which have come as investors ratcheted up expectations for interest rate increases this year by the Federal Reserve.
Also on Friday, the Commerce Department reported that retail sales fell 1.9 percent in December, the first drop after four straight months of sales increases.
benchmark, has jumped nearly 5 percent this week — its fourth consecutive week of gains — and is approaching $83 a barrel.
Gross domestic product increased 0.9 percent in November from the month before, according to the Office for National Statistics, with the construction and manufacturing sectors returning to growth as some businesses were less disrupted by supply shortages.
If the economy does not shrink by more than 0.2 percent in December, and there are not more data revisions, then the quarterly G.D.P.
But the British economy is expected to take a hit in December.
In December, the Bank of England cut its growth forecast for the fourth quarter by half a percent, which would leave the economy 1.5 percent smaller than its prepandemic size.
Although the daily number of Covid cases is falling again in Britain, the economy faces other hurdles in the next few months.
“Omicron looks set to fade almost as quickly as it arrived, thanks partly to the rapid rollout of booster jabs,” Samuel Tombs, an economist at Pantheon Macroeconomics, wrote in a note to clients.
Devising a more tailored emergency rule for a specific set of higher-risk companies, addressing the court majority’s criticism of the employer mandate as a “blunt instrument,” could be quick.
The blocking of a federal rule subjects larger employers to a patchwork of city and state vaccine rules, which would have been pre-empted by a single federal rule.
Many white-collar employees can remain at home, while blue-collar workers who have to conduct business in person must venture out.
Shares of the French state-controlled utility Électricité de France fell by as much as 24 percent on Friday after the government announced measures to protect retail customers from energy price rises.
Despite the lack of hard data for December, analysts cautioned that a resurgence of Covid infections along with fresh restrictions on shopping and entertainment pointed to the start of a possible recession at the end of the year, with the economy not picking up again until the second quarter of 2022.
Others, like a call for a report on race- and gender-based pay gaps at the company and a pledge to prohibit sales of facial recognition to government entities, failed.
Mr. Gates solicited at least two employees while he was running Microsoft, according to reports in The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal.