Turbulent Times Ahead: US Spending Surge and Inflation Trends

Unlocking the Benefits: Deliverable KRW Market Reforms and Their Potential Impact

US spending surges, but it’s not sustainable

US consumer spending is on track to drive third quarter GDP growth of perhaps 3-3.5%. However, this is not sustainable. American consumers are running down savings and using their credit cards to finance a large proportion of this. With financial stresses becoming more apparent and student loan repayments restarting, a correction is coming.

 

Inflation pressures are moderating

Today’s main data release is the July personal income and spending report and it contains plenty of interesting and highly useful information. Firstly, it includes the Federal Reserve’s favoured measure of inflation, the core Personal  Consumer Expenditure deflator, which is a broader measure of  prices than the CPI measure that is more widely known. It rose 0.2% month-on-month for the second consecutive month, which is what we want to see as, over time, that sort of figure will get annual inflation trending down to 2% quite happily.

 

Services PCE deflator (YoY%)

Source: Macrobond, ING

 

The slight negative is the core services ex housing, which the Fed is watching carefully due to if being more influenced by labour input costs. It posted a 0.46% MoM increase after a 0.3% gain in June so we are not seeing much of a slowdown in the year-on-year rate yet as the chart above shows. With unemployment at just 3.5% a tight jobs market could keep wage pressures elevated and mean inflation stays higher for longer so we could hear some hawkishness from some Fed officials on the back of this. Nonetheless, the market is seemingly shrugging this off right now given signs of slackening in the labour market from the latest job openings data and the Challenger job lay-off series.

Unlocking the Benefits: Deliverable KRW Market Reforms and Their Potential Impact

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