什么在推动消费者支出

William Blair We are seeing lower recession challenges and theU.S. consumer very resilient, and that’s bringingresiliency in our core products for food demand. – Archer Daniels Midland Company, Second-Quarter Earnings Call I’ll let you know we’re really staring down at con-sumer spending and it’s been flat last few months,maybe several months, but it’s differentiated asyou look at goods versus services. We’re clearlyseeing, and I talked about it in my opening re-marks, less on the goods and more on the services. – Union Pacific, Second-Quarter Earnings Call The resiliency of the U.S. consumer over the last year in theface of sharp increases in interest rates has been a surpriseto most. Not only has the unemployment rate remainedexceptionally low, but consumer confident has recentlybeen rising again. However, spending is already startingto moderate and in the coming quarters we anticipate thisactivity to slow further to the point where a mild recessionis more likely than not—i.e., we may not be in for as cleanan escape, or an “immaculate disinflation” back to 2% infla-tion and no recession, as the market currently anticipates.Given that the behavior of the consumer is key to thisnarrative, in thisEconomics Weekly,we reexamine whathave been the main drivers of consumer spending overthe last few years, and what those drivers might looklike in the quarters ahead. Hence, despite what seemingly have been rapid gains inwages and salaries over the last few years, much of thiswas money illusion; these increases were in many in-stances significantly below the pace of inflation. Exhibit 3,for example, shows the mean growth in real average hourlyearnings between 2021 and 2022 compared to the latestreading for June 2023. Only one sector experienced wageincreases over this prior period, leisure and hospitality,with every other major sector flat to down. There are four key drivers of consumer spending—savings,disposable income, credit, and consumer confidence. Belowwe examine each of these factors. Real Personal Income Growth—FromDrag to Driver, but … Then Back to Drag? The foundation and largest source of financing for consumerspending is income growth, with wages accounting for thebulk of this (exhibit 1). Here we can see that real personalincome growth was negative through most of 2021 and allof 2022; encouragingly, it turned positive in January 2023(exhibit 2). The upshot here is twofold.First, to the extent that realincome growth was weak and/or negative throughoutmuch of the previous two years, this suggests consumptionwas being driven by factors other than income. Second,if real income is now accelerating, this could be a majorcatalyst for consumer strength going forward, assuming itcontinues and based on the extent that it is not offset byweakness from the other areas that have supported spend-ing in recent years. Unfortunately, labor market conditions have indeedalready started to turn. Exhibit 4 shows the Kansas CityFed’s Labor Market Conditions Index, which is an aggre-gate of 24 different labor market variables (e.g., initialjobless claims, average hourly earnings, JOLTS data, andnonfarm payrolls). This series has tended to be highlyconsistent over time, either heading in one direction William Blair or another for extended periods, with relative few falsesignals. Thus, what the exhibit also shows is that once theindex starts to turn down, the decline tends to be quiterapid. The current rolling over would therefore be consis-tent with a moderation in both employment and incomegrowth in the coming months and quarters. If this pace continues, it will wipe out this excess by theend of the year, meaning that savings return to theirpre-pandemic trend. While this does not represent a diresituation for consumers—they were in great shape beforethe pandemic—it does imply that this source of additionalspend will no longer be supporting consumption goingforward, making households once again more dependenton both income and credit. Excess Savings—Diminishing Steadily A clear factor helping to support consumption over the lastthree years has been the excess savings that were built upduring the peak quarantine period and were mainly theresult of government stimulus in the form of tax rebates,tax credits, direct payments, and the suspension of studentdebt repayments. Credit—Banks Reluctant to Lend, RatesHigh, but Consumer Balance Sheets Solid Much has been made about the recent surge in credit carddebt by U.S. consumers over the last year, as depicted inexhibit 6. Yet, it is worth placing this increase in revolvingcredit context. There is no one perfect measure of exactly how much in theway of excess savings were accrued, but the San FranciscoFed’s method, which simply looks at the level of savingsabove the pre-pandemic trend, is sensible enough. It showsthat between January 2020 and August 2021, U.S. house-holds accumulated $2.1 trillion in excess savings. Sincethen, they have been drawing down those savin