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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Appearances
Consumer spending makes up about two thirds of the US economy.
And consumer spending on especially on services, that is really the driving force behind a lot of US economic activity.
So when consumers pull back, it has enormous repercussions for the economy as a whole.
I think a lot of things have just kind of coalesced at once.
You know, we did see a lot of inflation in 2022, especially around the summer.
Of course, that inflation was also being driven by the fact that there was strong demand for services and things like that stuff that consumers wanted to get out and do after being in pandemic lockdowns for two years, two and a half years.
So really, I think what we're seeing now is just things are really catching up to consumers in a lot of ways.
You know, inflation is still high.
We have seen that inflation has cooled since the summer of last year.
But it's not like things are going into reverse.
You know, prices are still going up.
They're just going up a little bit more slowly than they were before.
And people are feeling the pinch, you know, the debt is getting more expensive as well.
If you have a balance on your credit card, you know, that's getting more expensive every month, your payments, you know, becoming more expensive to service.
Of course, the housing market is in a big slump because of high mortgage rates, high borrowing costs.
And the thing that's happening now is that people have really run down the savings that they built up during the pandemic.
This was a big buffer to a lot of households, especially lower income households.
And those savings really helped to fuel consumer spending throughout 2022.
I mean, I think for longer than a lot of economists were expecting.
But people are feeling tapped out.
Showing 161–180 of 611 · page 9 of 31
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