On November 28th Power and Money Discusses the Christmas Shopping Season
Lenore Hawkins joins David Asman and the Power and Money team to discuss Christmas shopping trends. A few things to keep in mind:
• Shoppers spent an average of $398 over the weekend, up 9.1% from $365 last year.
• This year it wasn’t so much Black Friday as Freebie Friday, so I’m cautious about extrapolating a few days into the Christmas shopping season.
• A Deloitte survey found that the number of households looking to cut their holiday shopping budget this year rose to 42% from 38% last year.
• We just had a rather large revision for Q3 GDP from 2.5% to 2.0%. At this stage of the business cycle, growth is usually much closer to 5% than 2%.
• The income side of the national accounts shows an economy in distress. Real disposable personal income is now estimated to have decline 0.5% in Q2 (initially reported as a 0.6% gain) and dropped by 0.8%. If we look at personal after-tax income, the recession has arrived.
• More American’s 25 to 34 are living with their parents than ever before – almost 6 million. 26% increase since 2007.
