WASHINGTON (Reuters) -U.S. wholesale inventories increased a bit less than initially thought in July, suggesting businesses were not rushing to rebuild inventory after stocks were depleted in the second quarter.<\/p>\n
Stocks at wholesalers edged up 0.1%, instead of rising 0.2% as estimated last month, the Commerce Department’s Census Bureau said on Wednesday. Economists polled by Reuters had expected last month’s estimate would be unrevised.<\/p>\n
Inventories, a key part of gross domestic product, gained 0.2% in June. They advanced 1.3% on a year-over-year basis in July. Wholesale stocks of motor vehicles dropped 1.6%. But stocks of apparel surged 1.9%, while those of prescription medication increased 1.8%. Grocery inventories increased 2.0%.<\/p>\n
Inventories decreased at a $32.9 billion annualized rate in the second quarter, subtracting 3.29 percentage points from GDP. That was, however, more than offset by a record 4.95 percentage point contribution from a smaller trade deficit.<\/p>\n
The economy grew at a 3.3% annualized rate last quarter after contracting at a 0.5% pace in the first quarter.<\/p>\n
Sales at wholesalers jumped 1.4% in July after rising 0.7% in June. At July’s sales pace it would take wholesalers 1.28 months to clear shelves, down from 1.29 months in June.<\/p>\n
(Reporting by Lucia Mutikani; Editing by Hugh Lawson)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"WASHINGTON (Reuters) -U.S. wholesale inventories increased a bit less than initially thought in July, suggesting businesses were not…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":136095,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[45,49,48,88,46,15997],"class_list":["post-136094","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-economy","tag-business","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-commerce-department","tag-economy","tag-inventories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/136094","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=136094"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/136094\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/136095"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=136094"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=136094"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=136094"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}