Is the Glass Half Full or Half Empty?

 

I am of the opinion that the consumer is living on borrowed time

On a retail level, inventory snags have been worked out and deliveries arrive more or less on time.  Large ticket items gather dust as they await a buyer.  Manufacturers are offering discounts - something that disappeared during all of the Covid 19 nonsense and the reckless distribution of funds from the pinheads at the Federal level.  Small ticket items and necessities continue to be purchased.  

Retail employers are becoming more and more choosy about who they assign hours and managers have been placed upon an "hours diet" by the home office for their store employees.

The job reports are somewhat misleading.  True, there are A LOT OF JOBS out there but not all jobs are created equal.  If you lose a cushy tech job paying big bucks and the only job you can obtain in your area is a hospitality or retail position in its place, your lifestyle will need to adjust.  Some states are experiencing an uptick in first time unemployment claims.  Not all of the recently unemployed are going to rush out and accept the first offer thrown at them - more often than not they are going to take a little siesta from working in the hopes that they will be able to replace their old salary with a new salary that is equal to or greater than what they lost.  It may become a game of musical chairs.

Some economists are arguing that "Great Americans" have a long way to go before becoming "maxed out" on consumer credit.  Their collective credit limit far exceeds their collective current balance.  A simpleton's point of view if you ask me - many truly credit worthy people will NEVER charge as much as their Visa or Mastercard allows because IT WOULD NOT BE PRUDENT.  

As the Fed continues to tighten (no more Quantitative Easing) and as the student loan repayment moratorium finally ends, we will see just how much gas the American Consumer has left in the tank.

Personally, I see the consumer of large ticket items every time I go to work and I pay attention to their patterns and their moods.  Not all but many of them are sweating every dime they have to shell out.

See the Statistica chart and article here

"And lastly, as opposed to their government, Americans are far from reaching their debt ceiling, at least as far as credit cards are concerned. With a total credit card balance of $986 billion and a total limit of $4.5 trillion, U.S. consumer actually have $3.5 trillion in untapped available credit on their cards."