Matthew C Klein, Columnist

A Better Retail Report, Courtesy of MasterCard

New data from MasterCard Advisors provides some further insight into consumer spending and Â the state of the economy in the U.S., Canada and the U.K.

June 13, 2013 at 12:41 PM UTC

By Matthew C Klein

Matthew C. Klein writes for Bloomberg View about the economy and financial markets. He previously wrote for the Economist magazine and its economics blog, Free Exchange. Before that, Klein was a research associate at the Council on Foreign Relations, where he spent more than two years studying the history of the Federal Reserve and the intellectual history of monetary economics for an upcoming book by Sebastian Mallaby. He also worked at Bridgewater Associates, where he studied the economies of Central and Eastern Europe and advised institutional investors on asset-liability management. Klein has a bachelor's degree in history from Yale University. Originally from Chicago, he lives in New York.

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More than 70 percent of the U.S. economy is driven by consumer spending. Small wonder that the monthly retail sales report, which today showed a 0.6 percent increase, gets so much attention. Those official reports are valuable, but data collected by payments companies can provide more detailed information real-time.

For example, MasterCard Advisors combines its tracking of tens of billions of transactions with proprietary algorithms to createmonthly estimatesof retail spending for the U.S., U.K. and Canada. Yesterday, I interviewed Sarah Quinlan, the head of MasterCard Advisors' Market Insights group, about theirlatest report, which came out earlier this week. The U.S. economy continues to grow at a relatively weak pace. However, it is outperforming most other large countries.