Mubasher: US wholesale stockpiles declined by the end of September, official final estimates showed on Friday.

Wholesale inventories, excluding manufacturing sales branches, came in at $676.7 billion last September, falling by 0.4% from the downwardly revised $679.5 billion in August, the US Commerce Department’s Census Bureau said.

Meanwhile, stockpiles at wholesalers rose by 4.8% in September, compared to the revised reading in the same month of last year.

Sales of merchant wholesalers stood unchanged at $498.6 billion month-on-month, but they fell by 0.6% from the same month of the prior year.

At September’s sales pace, wholesalers would take 1.36 months to clear shelves, unchanged from the same pace recorded in August, and faster than the ratio of 1.29 logged in the same month a year earlier.

By 3:13 pm GMT, the US dollar index, which tracks the greenback against a basket of six key peers, rose by 0.16% to 98.3020.