The US retail sector will report very poor holiday sales results.

I have no tips on how bad the numbers will be, I only take the numbers of executive moves during January, while they were in the midst of crunching the numbers.

Retailers across every price point have announced store closings and executives leaving, this cannot portend good results.

Target closing Canadian operations, Sears trying to sell its operations up north. Macy’s closing stores.

Dollar outlets working out merger agreements with large store closings, under the guise of duplicate locations. If that’s the case that two discounters can’t be near each other seems counter intuitive.

As gas prices crumbled leading into the shopping season, analysts assumed that “savings” would find itself on the books of retailers.

That did not occur as consumers took the “savings” as paid down debt and bolstered savings, according to latest data from the Federal Reserve.

As the groundhog says 6 more weeks of winter, retail sales and earnings — coming out before that 6 weeks — will show there is a definite chill in the consumer spending numbers.