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How you doing, consumer?

From Marketplace, I'm Nancy Marshall Ginser in Washington.

Retail sales in April were up a half percent compared to the month before and up 4.9 percent from a year ago, according to the Census Bureau. This as inflation remains stuck above the Federal Reserve's 2 percent target. For more on this, we're joined by Christopher Lowe, Chief Economist at FHN Financial in New York.

Good morning.

Good morning, Nancy.

So are retail sales higher because consumers are resilient and buying more stuff,

or are we spending more just because prices are higher and the stuff we want is more expensive?

For now, it's both. It's the biggest contributor to retail sales growth, no surprise, in the last

two months, is higher gasoline prices. So we're still buying as much gas as we were before.

It's a lot more expensive. That's boosting sales. But away from

gasoline, we continue to see decent spending on things like clothing, electronics, sporting goods.

Those were all decent contributors to sales in April.

Okay, well, that's good.

How much of the retail sales increase could have been driven by tax refunds, do you think?

I think that was probably at least part of it.

You know, the fact that we're looking at sales growth in the last three months, on a three-month basis,

the strongest sales growth since 2022 suggests that there was more money to spend.

...