Yesterday the Conference Board released its measure of consumer confidence, which dropped to 44.5 in August. This brings the Conference Board measure of confidence in line with the Reuters/University of Michigan measure of consumer sentiment. Bloomberg summarizes the Conference Board results. Confidence is important, since consumer spending accounts for the lion’s-share of aggregate spending. Consumer […]

I’ll make this quick, since I’m going to get in trouble for writing on a national holiday. But the pace of annual jobs growth is too slow to generate strong wage and salary income. Much empirical research has been dedicated to the estimation of consumption functions, generally finding that labor income is the primary driver […]

Readers of this blog know that I am in finance, specifically global fixed income. This blog post covers wealth effects in the financial industry, which is a relatively dominant share of total US compensation, 7.3% in 2009 and likely higher now (data are truncated at 2009). My view is that economists underestimate the wealth effects […]

I remain very skeptical about the sustainability of the recovery, as the labor market is in shambles and nominal wage growth is unlikely to facilitate “healthy” deleveraging – please see this recent post “Reducing household financial leverage: the easy way and the hard way”. I digress; because you can’t fight the data. And for now, […]

Today’s release by the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas of October’s Trimmed Mean Personal Consumption Expenditure gives us a chance to check this “alternative measure of core inflation.” The clearest thing is that it does what the FRB Dallas intends: generally reduces the measure of inflation: For the graphic above, any value above the line […]

by Rebecca Wilder Thrill. The Conference Board reported that the August consumer confidence index (CCI) jumped 14% in August to 54.06. In contrast, the August University of Michigan Consumer Sentiment index (CSI) fell; but the two generally trend together, and the CSI is subject to revisions reported tomorrow. Confidence can be swayed by current political […]

rdan Rebecca Wilder will begin writing as a Bear soon. Meanwhile, she maintains her own blog NEWSNECONOMICS. Here is an example of an Aug. 19,2009 post, which I am cross posting today, and a follow up post here. There were several questions raised, but I think it an interesting notion. I own an old Malibu […]