Walmart's aggressive price cuts and use of tariff refunds to lower prices indicate a loss of pricing power and a pressured consumer, but also a deliberate strategy to protect volume and gain market share.

Walmart is lowering prices on more than 11,000 products.

And Walmart's a big one. A good place to start for the retail sector, especially we're talking about food and groceries, because they recently said, "Look, in response to the weakest sales figures we've seen in six years out of Walmart, they're cutting the prices on 11,000 items, which is double the number that they normally do.

The lowest cost retailer is lowering costs on double the number of stuff that it normally does." That tells you everything you know about this inflationary scenario. I mean, just think about what that means.

The largest retailer in the US is not behaving as if it can freely pass every additional cost on to its customers. It is investing aggressively in lowering prices to protect sales volume and to gain market share from those who can't follow along.

Walmart reported that shoppers spent less per trip than they did a year earlier. While the total number of transactions remain roughly unchanged, customers are still coming through the doors.

They're simply being more careful about what goes into their cart. Walmart also said its grocery price advantage over competing supermarkets is widening. That's an intentional strategy aimed at consumers with tightly managed budgets.

The company reported plans to use most of its 2.9 billion in tariff refunds to reduce prices on household essentials. That's especially significant because the refunds could have been retained as additional profit.

Instead, Walmart sees greater value in using that money to lower prices. Lower prices. Why? Because consumers are under pressure. And in that environment, gaining or preserving traffic requires better pricing.

Forget the Fed and the incorrect reading of the fluctuation in the 30-year long Treasury bond. If if Walmart really believed consumers could absorb higher prices and do so easily, it would have no reason to cut the price of 11,000 products.

That is what the loss of pricing power looks like in real time.

And that brings us back to the conference board and its expectations index. The warning that it has sent being below 80, the recession warning deserves a lot more attention than it's been getting because everybody defines a recession in the same exact way.

When the NBR up there in Massachusetts gets together and says, "We think there's been a recession that looks exactly like the recession, every single recession between 1944 and 2007."

Well, since 2007, recessions like the economy have changed, and the Conference Board and its expectations index has been picking up on those changes ever since they started here in the 2020s.

The index initially moved below the recession threshold all the way back in 2022. It then spent years moving around that dividing line, frequently remaining below 80 without producing the sudden officially recognized contraction that many economists were thinking when they used the term recession.

Because the NBR, the National Bureau of Economic Research didn't declare one, the indicator was increasingly dismissed as flawed or faulty. This isn't the only one. People started to doubt the yield curve inversions, too.

Consumers were described as excessively pessimistic to the whole Vibe session thing. The conference board itself effectively backed away from treating its own threshold as a reliable recession signal.

All because they're waiting for the NBER. But that assumes there are only two possible economic conditions. Either the economy is booming or it's in some dramatic recession involving mass layoffs and an immediate collapse in GDP.

But what if the economy instead just forgets how to grow? What if hiring slows towards zero, workers stop changing jobs, income growth weakens, and businesses cut openings without immediately firing millions of people?

That is what the expectation index appears to have detected. The labor market first entered a no hire, no fire condition. Employers were reluctant to expand, but they were also reluctant to dismiss experienced workers.

Job openings fell, hiring weakened, and workers stopped quitting because finding something better became less and less likely. Then the market moved closer to no higher and some fire.

The expectations index was consistent with that transition. Rather than produce a false recession warning, it may have accurately described a slow sideways contraction. They forgot how to grow economy that was becoming progressively more fragile.

Consumers weren't necessarily predicting the date of an official NBR recession. They were identifying a sustained deterioration economic opportunity that just didn't look like the NBR style of recession.

They were saying it was a recession anyway. And as time goes on, the more data and real world developments back them up. Not to mention elections as well as market curves and shapes.

Now the index has fallen to 68.2. The warning is no longer hovering around the line. It is deeply below it. And it is that environment, not an inflationary one, with a resilient labor market that we keep hearing about where the grocery wars and the potential for price wars in it really come into play.

You got Kroger, you got Aldi's, you got Walmart, and a whole bunch more that are responding to the world as it is, not as it's described out of Kevin Worsh's mouth.

Walmart, as I said, deploying billions of dollars from tariff refunds.

Walmart lowers its prices on more than 11,000 items.