{"id":337738,"date":"2010-02-18T16:58:14","date_gmt":"2010-02-18T21:58:14","guid":{"rendered":"tag:business.theatlantic.com,2010:\/\/3.36216"},"modified":"2010-02-18T16:58:12","modified_gmt":"2010-02-18T21:58:12","slug":"consumer-spending-flat-in-january-year-over-year","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/337738","title":{"rendered":"Consumer Spending Flat In January Year-Over-Year"},"content":{"rendered":"

Gallup has some sobering news<\/a> about consumer spending: it might not be improving as much as we thought. In fact, it seems spending was virtually flat in January 2010 compared to January 2009. Since consumer spending makes up 70% of the economy in the U.S., if that doesn’t rebound, it will be hard for anything else to either. Let’s look at the data.<\/p>\n

Here’s what Gallup shows for self-reported spending broken into two income segments: <\/p>\n

\"gallup<\/a> <\/p>\n

\"gallup<\/a> <\/p>\n

For upper-income Americans, that’s an increase of less than 3%. For middle- and lower-income income Americans, that’s a decrease of 7%. As you can see, in both graphs 2009 also looked an awful lot worse than 2008. Gallup says that this could be a “new normal.” <\/p>\n

I’m not sure about that. But this does show that spending isn’t really improving very much — if at all. It also reinforces the idea that the recovery probably won’t be particularly steep.<\/p>\n



\n

\n Email this Article<\/a>
\n Add to digg<\/a>
\n Add to Reddit<\/a>
\n Add to Twitter<\/a>
\n Add to del.icio.us<\/a>
\n Add to StumbleUpon<\/a>
\n Add to Facebook<\/a>
\n

\n\"\"<\/a>
\n\"\"<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Gallup has some sobering news about consumer spending: it might not be improving as much as we thought. In fact, it seems spending was virtually flat in January 2010 compared to January 2009. Since consumer spending makes up 70% of the economy in the U.S., if that doesn’t rebound, it will be hard for anything […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1535,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-337738","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/337738","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1535"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=337738"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/337738\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=337738"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=337738"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=337738"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}