By Geoffrey Smith
Investing.com -- U.S. retail sales cratered in March as state-wide lockdowns began to spread across the country in response to the Covid-19 epidemic.
Official data released Wednesday showed sales fell 8.7% from February, nearly three times as much as the sharpest monthly drop during the financial crisis in 2008. That was worse than the 8.0% drop forecast by analysts ahead of the release.
Core sales, which strip out auto sales, fell by 4.5%, marginally better than the 4.8% expected.
"The risk with retail sales data is that a structural shift to online retail sales may not be accurately captured in the numbers," UBS Global Wealth Management chief economist Paul Donovan said in a morning note. "For March at least there’s likely to be a very uneven pattern to retail sales and that’s going to be very difficult to interpret."