Archive for the ‘Spending’ Category
Personal Savings Rate
A collapsed economy has many implications, one of which is a rather drastic uptick in the personal savings rate of most Americans. This is entirely logical: unemployment is up, wages are down, virtually every asset we own has lost value, so Americans are spending less than they used to. We are, collectively, at last living [...]
Justin Fox Agrees: Don’t Spend More Than You Earn
[via Alex Tabarrok] The Curious Capitalist Justin Fox was on CNBC recently, with a simple message:
We can’t continue to spend more than we earn.
One of the anchors was shocked at this proclamation, and produced what I think is the greatest quote I’ve heard in a long time: “we can’t have the sort of booming economy we’ve had [...]
The Consumption Adjustment
I’ve written before about the paradox of thrift we now face; we desperately need to reign in our debt-fueled consumption. Not because there is something bad about consumption, but rather because we have been spending money we don’t have. That is, plain and simple, unsustainable. I noted a couple of months ago:
Our financial system is [...]
The Boomer Bust
We’ve been talking about consumer spending quite frequently. And with good reason - it’s a crucial part of the cycle we’re currently in. Or, as Paul Krugman stated, we face a widening gyre with “feedback loops causing the financial crisis to spin ever further out of control.”
The WSJ takes a demographic look at the crisis, [...]
Spending What You Make
Spending only what you make shouldn’t be a foreign concept. It’ll become a whole lot more familiar in our current economic climate.
Henry Blodget at Clusterstock explains why consumers are a critical component of this recession. [via Feelix]
Because the US consumer is finally broke. For thirty years, we piled on debt and then spent almost every new [...]
A Decade Later, Back to Where We Were
Where We Are
It feels like we’ve been peering over this cliff for a while - I remember first hearing whispers of Countrywide Financial having problems last fall. That home prices might start to cave from their catastrophic heights. But after each mini-crisis, it seemed like we hit the bottom. Now it seems like we have [...]
