The Welcome to the Real Vision Daily Briefing. I'm Jack Farley. It's Friday, May 15th.

We've got our CEO Raul standing by with senior editor Ash Bennington,

and they're ready to give you their macro analysis.

But first, April showers have brought May flowers,

but for many US retailers, it's a silent spring.

US headline retail numbers out today down 16.4% month of

a month for April, much worse than the 12% expected by economists and almost

double the 8.3% drop last March.

By Sector, the worst drops were in electronics

and appliance stores, which was down 60.6%,

and in clothing and clothing accessories,

which plummeted a shocking 78.8%.

The only category to show an increase in spending was non-store sales, which was up 8.4%.

This includes online retailers like Amazon and shows that online buying continues to dominate

as people are reluctant to go to stores.

This precipitous fall in retail activity

shows that consumers have a heightened sense of thrift as the labor market

continues to tighten.

And as some states start to reopen, consumer spending will likely pick up.

The question going forward is how quickly and

are the brick and mortar retailers sufficiently capitalized to weather the storm?

In other news today, Raal sat down with legendary investor Howard Marks. It's a fascinating conversation about where we are in the credit cycle and how investors can position themselves going forward.

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