Harriet Torry

speaker

611 appearances 11 recordings 1 series first heard Sep 2017 last heard Dec 2024

Harriet Torry’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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WSJ Your Money Briefing · Consumers' Stimulus Dilemma: Spend, Save or Pay Down Debt? · 26 Jan 2021 podcast

There is a big, you know, there are a lot of people who are unemployed and really need that money to get by and to buy food every day.

But

many other people, although they're receiving these stimulus checks, they do also still have jobs.

So they're putting the money aside.

And, you know, for some people, this is nice security to have in case there was an emergency, they have a bit of a financial buffer.

But others are starting to think ahead, you know, we're seeing a rollout of vaccines.

And for some people, they've got all these savings, and they kind of want to maybe spend it on something a bit more fun.

You know, we have

People saying, well, you know, I want to save my money for a vacation or, you know, I've been stuck in lockdown all these months.

I want to put my money towards, you know, dining out when I can again.

Yeah, I mean, it's interesting that, you know, there's the old saying that one man's spending is another man's income.

So, you know, in some sense, you can save too much.

It can be bad for the economy if there's so much saving, especially with interest rates being pretty low.

It's not like you're getting a big return on those savings.

But this has been an exceptionally weird time during COVID because we saw the savings rate just spike to these levels that hadn't been seen basically since the depression because people were so fearful.

And they just really reined in the non-essential spending out of concern of job losses or of illness or extra medical bills.

All of these enormous unknowns, they really put the wind up people and put fear into people.

And so we have seen this big increase in rainy day funds.

But of course, you know, if things do start to ease and people start to get more comfortable with going out and about and spending again, then perhaps some of these people will just be ready to spend some of this money that they've been saving up.

And that's really potentially a very big boost for the consumer driven economy.

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