The Consumer Confidence Index fell slightly in March from 104.8 to 104.7, well below some economist expectations of 106.5. Although consumers’ perception of the likelihood of a recession fell this month, consumers were less confident about their family’s financial situation in the next six months. The percentage of consumers who expected their incomes to fall rose from 11.9% in February to 13.8% in March.
Elizabeth Pancotti, director of special initiatives for the Roosevelt Institute, said that consumers’ experience of the economy and their financial situation may come down to crises they’re feeling that may not show up at a macro level but may strike their budgets particularly hard.
“When egg prices finally come down and chicken prices finally come down, but orange juice is high because of some random citrus greening disease or some other shocking food item, your total grocery bill doesn’t come down and that really highlights it,” she said. “There’s one crisis after another at a micro level, which I think is really why we’re not seeing that divergence between overall economic strength and at a very micro level, the feelings of average consumers.”
The big ticket items are out of reach for the Zoomers and Millennials.
Homes, education costs, daycare, retirement later on, and healthcare. Those have to be addressed. Politically there is not one Boomer that can stop that force of nature. Besides the extremely spoiled Boomers saw it was addressed for themselves. Or at least their much better parents saw to it before we did a rug pull on the Xers and Millennials.
There is no love lost for Boomer ignorance.
Unless there is help with the bigger ticket items no one lives well.
All the Boomers did was believe poor people were not deserving. About as selfishly convenient as possible.
Basically statistics on the economy are affected by so many things that governments tend to pick those that suit them.
Don’t forget that old saying:
There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics
I did quite a bit of statistics with my economics degree and when i read about ‘hedonic regression’ I realized how meaningless many of the figures produced were:
How can you honestly compare economically a car of the 1980’s with a car produced today, or a mobile phone of even ten years ago with an Apple Iphone today?
Those are the smaller ticket items. Anyone can have much of that. The life style changers are the big ticket items.
There is no point in locking out government policies that improve the American Middle Class’s wealth. We have seen what that leads to with factories offshoring. It is an ignorant idea to starve the poor or deny the middle class.
Low unemployment would suggest that consumers are getting paychecks and doing ok overall. But their eyes mostly see inflation and those income dollars not buying as much. They should be happier about the micro economy than they say they are.
Why?
Prices are significantly higher than they were 2-3 years ago - and are still rising at rates that are on the high side of numbers before the pandemic. Interest rates have been higher than any point since 2002 or so, raising people’s costs of financing major purchases (cars and homes) and credit card debt. While broad heuristics like the “misery index” treat unemployment and inflation equally, far more people are affected by the latter than the former.
People are less confident because all the folks that had forgotten that you can have a sudden sharp shock to inflation rates and interest rates (or who had never lived through that at all) got a painful reminder that yes, you can have big unexpected jumps in those things.
Those changes are very painful to young people - they’re the ones who take on new debt to shift wealth from their middle age peak to their earlier years by financing education and housing. They’re very painful to old people, who are no longer working and get punished by inflation.
They’re probably not as painful to economists (or someone who holds a job like the “director of special initiatives for the Roosevelt Institute”), who are probably not young people starting out in life or people in or near retirement.