Tag Archive: personal savings rate

Inventory Flood Continues Just As Consumers Tap Out

2022-05-31

If it continues to play out the same way, it would be all the worst scenarios lumped together all at the same time. A real unfortunate convergence, yet one that has been entirely predictable. Consumers reaching their absolute spending limits.

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Personal Income and Spending: The Other Side

2020-06-01

by Jeffrey P. Snider

2020-06-01

The missing piece so far is consumers. We’ve gotten a glimpse at how businesses are taking in the shock, both shocks, actually, in that corporations are battening down the liquidity hatches at all possible speed and excess. Not a good sign, especially as it provides some insight into why jobless claims (as the only employment data we have for beyond March) have kept up at a 2mm pace.These are second order effects.

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We All Know Who’s On First, But What’s On Second?

2020-05-08

by Jeffrey P. Snider

2020-05-08

It wasn’t entirely unexpected, though when it was announced it was still quite a lot to take in. On September 1, 2005, the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) reported that the nation’s personal savings rate had turned negative during the month of July. The press release announcing the number, in trying to explain the result was reduced instead to a tautology, “The negative personal saving reflects personal outlays that exceed disposable personal...

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Retail Sales, Consumer Sentiment, And The Aftermath Of Hurricanes

2018-01-17

by Jeffrey P. Snider

2018-01-17

Consumer confidence has been sky-high for some time now, with the major indices tracking various definitions of it at or just near highs not seen since the dot-com era. Economists place a lot of emphasis on confidence in all its forms, including that of consumers, and there is good reason for them to do so; or there was in the past.

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The (Economic) Difference Between Stocks and Bonds

2017-11-04

by Jeffrey P. Snider

2017-11-04

US Disposable Personal Income, Jan 1985 - 2017

Real Personal Consumption Expenditures (PCE) rose 0.6% in September 2017 above August. That was the largest monthly increase (SAAR) in almost three years. Given that Real PCE declined month-over-month in August, it is reasonable to assume hurricane effects for both. Across the two months, Real PCE rose by a far more modest 0.5% total, or an annual rate of just 3.4%, only slightly greater the prevailing average.

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US Retail Sales: Retail Storms

2017-10-17

by Jeffrey P. Snider

2017-10-17

Retail sales were added in September 2017 due to the hurricanes in Texas and Florida (and the other states less directly impacted). On a monthly, seasonally-adjusted basis, retail sales were up a sharp 1.7% from August. The vast majority of the gain, however, was in the shock jump in gasoline prices. Retail sales at gasoline stations rose nearly 6% month-over-month, so excluding those sales retail sales elsewhere gained a far more modest 0.6%.

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Retail Sales and the End of ‘Reflation’

2017-09-22

by Jeffrey P. Snider

2017-09-22

There will be an irresistible urge to the make this about the weather, but more and more data shows it’s not any singular instance. Nor is it transitory. What does prove to be temporary time and again is the upside. The economy gets hit (by “dollar” events), bounces back a little, and then goes right back into the dumps. This, it seems, is the limited extent of cyclicality in these times.

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Toward The Housing Bubble, Or Great Depression?

2017-09-08

by Jeffrey P. Snider

2017-09-08

US Personal Savings Rate, Jan 2000 - 2017

During the middle 2000’s, one more curious economic extreme presented itself in an otherwise ocean of extremes. Though economists were still thinking about the Great “Moderation”, the trend for the Personal Savings Rate was anything but moderate, indicated a distinct lack of modesty on the part of consumers. In early 2006, the Bureau of Economic Analysis calculated that the rate had been negative for all of 2005. It was the first time in seventy...

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