Bank of America’s internal card transaction data is pointing to a May retail sales number that could blow past what Wall Street is expecting. The bank’s real-time aggregated credit and debit card spending data suggests month-over-month retail sales growth of roughly 0.8%, nearly double the Bloomberg consensus estimate of approximately 0.4%.
What the card data actually shows
BofA publishes these insights through its Consumer Checkpoint reports, a recurring series that uses the bank’s massive internal dataset of credit and debit card transactions to track real-time consumer spending patterns.
The anticipated strength isn’t limited to a single category either. The ex-autos metric, which strips out volatile automobile purchases to give a cleaner read on underlying consumer behavior, is also showing comparable strength. Same goes for the control group, a subset of retail sales that feeds directly into GDP calculations.
Zerohedge characterized BofA’s data as signaling a potential “blowout beat” for the upcoming retail sales figures. The official Census Bureau retail sales report is scheduled for June 17, which means the market will soon find out whether the card data was right.
