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We simply don't have the metrics to show it one way or the other. We have M2V for example in the US, but it isn't broken out by household income percentiles or even quintiles. We could have great velocity from lots of capital movement from equities for example, but very sluggish velocity in retail sectors that serve the low and middle socioeconomic classes.

I think the general weakness in retail (not entirely attributable to e-commerce, as e-tailing is still around 10-15% of overall retail) is likely explainable by low velocity of money in the low to middle classes. The wage stagnation over the past few decades while overall corporate revenue and profits continue to grow certainly suggest some kind of low velocity or siphoning effect. There's a certain survivorship bias in that comparison since corporations that stagnate to much eventually are put out of business, while developed nation citizens can stagnate until they pass away, so it isn't a perfect comparison to hypothesize about. But again, we simply aren't measuring for any of this nuance at this time.

If we did start measuring for it somehow, then someone would have to figure out how to measure the unit of money moving between income bands and from household to/from "big corporations" (say, any of the publicly-traded companies in the CRSP US Total Market Index and privately-held companies with the same amount of revenue as the lowest revenue element in the CRSP). Damned if I know how that would be captured, though.



Retail is a bunch of individual stories. BBBY killed it over the holidays; Macy's did not. Better to take retail company by company at this point.




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