People who need support, should get support. As for the rest? On my soapbox, wildly wagging consumer income and spending data.
By Wolf Richter | 30 October 2020
WOLF STREET — Weirdest economy ever, powered by stimulus money, and the now expired extra unemployment money, and money from rents-and-mortgage-payments-not-made, and money from cash-out mortgage refis of at record low interest rates. And folks “in aggregate” – all mixed together, with all inequalities papered over – are spending record amounts on goods, a lot of which are imported, but they’re not spending on services – not because they don’t have the money but because they have Pandemic-reasons for not buying those services.
Personal income from all sources in September ticked up a tad from August, to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of $19.8 trillion, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis today, having falling 6.0% from its wondrous stimulus-and-unemployment-money spike, but up 6.2% from a year ago:
Free money and Earned money.
Earned money. Personal income from wages and salaries alone – what people earn from their jobs or self-employment activities – rose 0.8% in September from August and edged past the year-ago level, to $9.38 trillion (annual rate), but was still down 2.9% from February […]
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