Friday , April 26 2024
Home / The Angry Bear / Personal income and spending both surprisingly continued to increase in September, plus a note on GDP

Personal income and spending both surprisingly continued to increase in September, plus a note on GDP

Summary:
Personal income and spending both surprisingly continued to increase in September, plus a note on GDP Yesterday the first estimate of Q3 GDP was reported. Since this report includes 2 long leading indicators, it gives us insight into what the economy might be like in the 2nd half of next year. I have a post on that up at Seeking Alpha. As usual, clicking over and reading should be informative for you, and it rewards me a little bit for my efforts. This morning personal income and spending for September was reported. Both real income and spending increased, which is positive – and surprising. On the spending side, below I show real personal spending (blue) in comparison with real retail sales (red), both scaled to 100 as of January of this year:

Topics:
NewDealdemocrat considers the following as important:

This could be interesting, too:

Angry Bear writes Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida addresses Congress . . .

Bill Haskell writes Manipulating Supply Chains and Manufacturing, for Corporate Influence and Profit

Eric Kramer writes Milei and dollarization

Joel Eissenberg writes How much should a life-saving drug cost?

Personal income and spending both surprisingly continued to increase in September, plus a note on GDP

Yesterday the first estimate of Q3 GDP was reported. Since this report includes 2 long leading indicators, it gives us insight into what the economy might be like in the 2nd half of next year.

I have a post on that up at Seeking Alpha. As usual, clicking over and reading should be informative for you, and it rewards me a little bit for my efforts.
This morning personal income and spending for September was reported. Both real income and spending increased, which is positive – and surprising.
On the spending side, below I show real personal spending (blue) in comparison with real retail sales (red), both scaled to 100 as of January of this year:

Personal income and spending both surprisingly continued to increase in September, plus a note on GDP

Both show similar trajectories, collapsing in April and rebounding since, including a further monthly increase from August to September. While real retail sales have exceeded their precession peak, the broader measure of real personal spending has still only recovered about 85% of its decline.

On the income side, here is a long term view of real personal  income minus transfer payments (like unemployment insurance)(red, right scale) vs. real disposable personal income (blue, left scale):

Personal income and spending both surprisingly continued to increase in September, plus a note on GDP

The former is one of the coincident economic series focused on by the NBER in declaring the beginning and end dates for recessions. Similarly to real personal income less transfer payments discussed above, it has rebounded by about 70% from its April bottom. Disposable income, however, increased sharply with the emergency Congressional stimulus, and remains elevated several percent above where it was just before the pandemic hit, as shown better in the close-up of the last two years shown below:
Personal income and spending both surprisingly continued to increase in September, plus a note on GDP
The continuing improvement in spending, and the fact that income remains elevated, despite the failure of Congress (due almost 100% to the Senate) to extend any further stimulus, is the biggest surprise in the economic data over the past several months.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *