The good news - wholesale inventories are being worked off (falling 0.3% MoM in November - biggest drop since May 2013). The bad news - inventories are being worked off (crushing Q4 GDP hopes and Fed forecasts). The ugly news - Wholesale sales collapsed 1.0% MoM - the biggest drop in a year (leaving the spread between sales and inventories at a record high). The ugliest data of all - inventories-to-sales spiked to 1.32x - (the highest since 2008's crisis recession and as high as the worst in the 2001 recession!)
The year-over-year drops are a disaster...
Recesion anyone?
This leaves a record absolute spread between sales and inventories...
Simply put - the "Field of Dreams" US Economy has utterly failed! We "built it" but they "did not come."