This morning’s better than expected retail sales number is having a number of ramifications: it’s good for fundamental considerations, but it’s bad for speculators in the QE trade and in gold. Retail sales in July rose 0.8% from June, the first rise in four months and the best pace since February, and while that isn’t exactly a game changer, it looks pretty good on a day when it was reported that the euro zone as a whole slipped back into contraction. “While this is certainly far from healthy growth,” Merrill Lynch senior U.S. economist Michelle Meyer wrote this morning, “it is also clearly not at recession levels ... (full story)