UK Retail Sales Expected Weaker

July 30, 2012 Share Print 0

Retailers’ hopes of a bumper summer are being dampened by poor weather and weak consumer confidence, Britain’s leading employers’ organisation has said.

The Confederation of Business Industry (CBI) said July sales had been far weaker than expected and detected little sign of a boost in August from the Olympics.

Of the retailers questioned in the monthly distributive trades survey, 44% said business was up on July 2011; 33% said sales volumes were down. The balance of +11 percentage points was well down on the +42 points expected when retailers were polled a month ago.

Judith McKenna, chair of the CBI distributive trades panel and Asda chief operating officer, said: “Retailers reported an annual rise in sales and orders for the third month in a row, but the increase was far slower than firms had anticipated.

via The Guardian

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Alfonso Esparza

Senior Currency Analyst at Market Pulse

Alfonso Esparza specializes in macro forex strategies for North American and major currency pairs. Upon joining OANDA in 2007, Alfonso Esparza established the MarketPulseFX blog and he has since written extensively about central banks and global economic and political trends. Alfonso has also worked as a professional currency trader focused on North America and emerging markets. He has been published by The MarketWatch, Reuters, the Wall Street Journal and The Globe and Mail, and he also appears regularly as a guest commentator on networks including Bloomberg and BNN. He holds a finance degree from the Monterrey Institute of Technology and Higher Education (ITESM) and an MBA with a specialization on financial engineering and marketing from the University of Toronto.