contributor and commentator. thank you for coming on the show. great to be here. so, i love to window shop. i love to go and look at the windows for the holidays. when you look at the situation, have retailers actually rebounded from the pandemic yet? they have more than rebounded, more than recovered. in fact, if you look at retail sales today, relative to when the pandemic began, they re way above trend, even after you adjust for inflation. and i think that s for a few reasons. one of which, of course, is that for a while, people were cooped up, and they were limited on things they could spend money on. they were reluctant to go to restaurants, travel, that sort of thing. so they spent their money on physical stuff. goods to refurbish their home or get a new wardrobe or what have you. then, of course, the government also gave american families a lot of money. during covid, during the initial shutdown.
no supplies coming on stream and you have the large numbers, which by the way, martha, just for the record are year numbers. they are not going to change substantially over the next three, four, five, six months because almost all of those numbers are already baked into the cake. the thing that bothers me on the inflation numbers even more than than they re baked into the cake is that the wholesale price index precedes the consumer price index and the wholesale price index is up a lot more than is the consumer price index. if you look at the passage of time, i would expect the consumer price index to rise going on into the future because prices pushing the consumer prices higher. it is bad. then you get the retail sales today, martha, just a catastrophe for one month. it can obviously be offset next month or whatever but these are all just piling on this administration who deserves to be piled on.
trace: a relatively calm ending today to a week of extremes on wall street. stocks rose in trading. the dow up 126, the nasdaq up 15. the s&p 500 up 6. but that is nothing compared to the huge dips and dives we have seen in recent days. it was down monday, up tuesday, down wednesday, up thursday, and now up again. it s the first time the dow has risen two sessions in a row since july 6th and 7th. that s back when the casey anthony trial was wrapping up. but it s still not a pretty picture for your 401(k). stocks were still down almost 2% on the week. they have fallen more than 10% in a month. bring the market down 6% from where it was at the start of the year. still, investors are finding small reasons to remain optimistic, a slight drop in jobless claims yesterday a solid report on retail sales today. increased sales in july at the