Why can't newspapers, even the upmarket ones, employ people who can interpret economic statistics properly? Today's Telegraph has a headline "Retail sales hit 25-year low" -- but of course, they didn't. The headline represents a misinterpretation of one of the far-too-numerous survey-based reports that the media love to play up. There are lots of these in the housing markets too, and they are almost never reported sensibly.
So what does this latest shock horror report, compiled by the CBI, actually say? Here are the key paragraphs from the Telegraph report:
"The trade body's survey of 153 retailers showed that 60pc of respondents said sales in the first half of August were lower than a year ago. Only 13pc sold more goods than a year earlier.
The balance of -46 percentage points is the lowest since the survey began in July 1983 and compares with -36 in July."
All that means is that retailers are gloomier, at least by this measure, than they've been for 25 years. But the actual value of retail spending is many times higher now than it was 25 years ago. What's more, the latest official data actually showed a small increase in retail sales in July, something which seems to have escaped the reporter on this story. So it's simply wrong to say that retail sales are at a 25-year low.
The sad thing is that the CBI will not make any effort to correct this misinterpretation of its survey -- in fact, it positively revels in its ability to generate misleading, doom-filled headlines. It's all ammunition for its increasingly strident calls for an interest rate cut. Too bad the newspapers keep falling for it.
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