Kai Risdahl

From American Public Media, this is Marketplace.

In Los Angeles, I'm Kai Risdahl.

It is Thursday.

Today, this one is the 14th of May.

Good as always to have you along, everybody.

One does not usually count the Census Bureau among the great statistical agencies of the United States government.

But one should, because in addition to all the straight up counting of people that it does, it also tracks a wide swath of what happens in this economy.

For our purposes today, two items specifically.

First of all, retail sales.

April is the month in question, up half a percent from March.

Nice job, American consumers.

Retail sales, by the way, measured in dollars, which makes it even more interesting that that half percent bump holds true even when you strip out volatile and expensive items like automobiles and gasoline.

So there is that.

Also on the rise, item two for us today, business inventories.

That is March data up nine tenths percent from February.

Those are headline numbers, of course, those two, and are decent on a first impression.

But as Daniel Ackerman reports to start us off, a closer inspection reveals some consternation among both businesses and consumers.

Wall Street today, do with this what you will, as NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang makes the rounds with President Trump in Beijing.

The chip design company's shares have popped 20%, 2-0% in the past seven trading days.

And while, yes, measures of market capitalization can be formulaic and overemphasized, at $235.74 a share at the close today, with 24 and a half or so billion shares outstanding, it's