Everybody needs money. That's why they call it money.

From full global headquarters, this is Motley Fool Money.

It's the Motley Fool Money Radio Show. I'm Chris Hill joining me this week's senior analyst Maria Gallagher and Jason Moser.

Good to see you both.

Nice to meet you.

Hey, we've got the latest headlines from Wall Street. We will dig into the business of AI and as always we've got a couple of stocks on our radar.

But we begin with the big macro.

Retail sales in August rose 0.7%. Not only does that bounce back from a drop in July, but economists were expecting sales to fall nearly 1% for the month.

So when you combine the higher than expected retail sales with initial jobless claims staying near their low for the pandemic, Maria, US economies looking pretty good considering the Delta variant.

Yet is those gains in August were prompted by arise in spending on clothing, electronics, furniture and home goods that's boosted by back to school shopping, child tax credit payments through the government.

Spending for clothing in the week ending September 11th was up 27% year over a year sales department stores rose 21%.

So with the stale, it's a variant you do see a shift away from services to things like travel and concerts, but it's back towards goods.

So that'll be interesting to monitor going forward, especially as we get closer to the holidays season.

However, the sales of cars and auto parts were down a lot.

We're still seeing that slow down and supply due to the semiconductor shortage Toyota recently announced plans to slash production by about 40%.

Dealership inventories are running low and I learned that the number of semiconductors in a modern car is at over 1000.

So cars really need semiconductors. So that'll be interesting to monitor as well and something that I find super fascinating that I think has really big implications is that the Atlanta Federal reserves wage tracker for August for the third month in a row.

Wages for lower skilled workers have risen faster than wages for higher skilled workers.

So that's only happened in the 25 year history of collecting this data in two months in early 2010.

So that's great news for the economy since low wage employees are actually more likely to spend their increases as opposed to higher paid employees are more likely to save.

So it could have implications for inflation, but I think that's also something definitely something to watch as we move forward in the recovery.

But all in all, it was it was pretty good sign.

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