Posted on 11/25/2015 2:11:23 PM PST by BenLurkin
Consumer spending rose slowly in October for the second straight month, as Americans boosted savings and spent less on utilities, cars and trucks.
Spending rose a seasonally adjusted 0.1% for the second month in a row, the Commerce Department said Wednesday. That was below Wall Street expectations: economists polled by MarketWatch had forecast a 0.3% increase.
Less was spent on autos even though the number of new cars and trucks sold last month was at a decade high, perhaps a sign of more discounting or bigger sales to car-rental agencies. Households also spent less on electricity and home heating fuel because of unseasonably warm weather.
What's more, Americans also increased their savings: the U.S. savings rate leapt to a three-year high of 5.6%. Surveys suggest consumers are unlikely to loosen their purse=strings during the holiday season unless they find good deals and discounts.
(Excerpt) Read more at marketwatch.com ...
Over-promising and under-delivering. I hate when that happens. Can't those consumers realize that Wall Street experts are sad?
Like a lot of other people, since I’m single, most of my disposable income goes toward paying down the principle of my mortgage. It will only get worse if Hitlery, or Colonel Sanders becomes the next president, as I’ll spend even less on non essentials. If Americans are smart, they’ll vote for either Cruz, or Trump. They give me hope for the future.
Why our FED will not learn from Japan experience? Japan has been printing money and had zero interest rates and QE for 20 years, and Japan is still in recession!
QE and ZIRP is like pushing on a string. It does not go anywhere. Pulling the string works much better. FED is pumping money like crazy for banks to borrow it at extreme low interest rates, but few are borrowing it from the banks. The cheap labor express and stifling regulation overload on small businesses have combined to kill demand for goods. For example savers and seniors have no interest income to spend on anything.
But all the academics running the FED live in their own dream world in ivory towers. None have experience in the real main street economy which survives by competing fiercely in the market place.
GOPe/RNC/Establishent....AKA Mr. Potter: “ What does this give us? A useless rabble, instead of a thrifty working class “
and the margin of error is???
I believe our government looked at Japan, realized the negative birthrate is killer, and simply opened our borders to prevent a similar problem. Instead, we have a different issue: The dwindling pool of taxpayers and/or workers in this country have to provide every basic necessity (as well as many luxuries) to most of those people coming in...
To champion traditional moral ideas would have helped better. The problem with just opening the border in hopes of solving the demographics is that whoever boogied in can then boogie right back out when things get uncomfortable enough.
... basically you end up with a game where people have little or no skin in it. That ain’t going to end well.
Obama won two elections because a rapidly-increasing number of people with no “skin in the game” outvoted the people who are invested in this country. When our banks are tripping over themselves for the illegal alien clientele (to assist them in sending remittances back south of the border), then obviously our government is complicit in it. How are these people avoiding the bank regulations set up to monitor terrorist money transfers?
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