Joe Pinsker
speaker
1,247 appearances
30 recordings
1 series
first heard Oct 2022
last heard Jan 2025
Joe Pinsker’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
WSJ Your Money Briefing · How Do Americans Feel About Their Finances? It’s Complicated · 10 Sep 2024
podcast
So we're kind of, quote unquote, back to normal on that.
In some way, yes, because consumer sentiment has improved in the past two years as inflation has cooled off.
But I think the instrumental thing to focus on in terms of people's psychology is just how prominently inflation looms in people's minds.
Even if their pay is going up, the fact of higher prices is probably just going to weigh a bit more.
And so the idea of making more money but then having it eroded by higher prices is just kind of frustrating.
The saving rate is a lot lower than what it was during the pandemic, and it's even notably lower than what it was throughout 2020.
2019.
And that may sound like a worrying thing, like people aren't able to put away money.
But one economist I was talking with said that he interprets this as just a sign that people are feeling confident about the price of their home or the value of their stock portfolio or the cash flow they're getting from fixed income.
Those things have all been up.
And so being able to save a little less is something that people might be doing from a place of confidence more than anything else.
Obviously, the money that many people have in the stock market is not money that they have access to on a daily basis.
But when they take a look at their accounts and see that the number has gotten bigger quite a bit over the past couple of years, that makes people feel a bit more confident and maybe comfortable possibly about their retirement.
Painfully is the short answer, but maybe one creative area that I've actually looked into in previous reporting is people trying to squeeze more life out of their current cars.
If you look at the data on average...
vehicle age in the US has gone up nearly a year over the past five years.
The current average age of a US vehicle is 12.6 years.
The cost of car ownership these days has inspired many people to renew their commitment to driving their cars until the wheels fall off.
I suppose the truest answer is that nobody really knows, but investors expect that the Fed will be cutting rates soon, which likely would mean that mortgage rates might start dropping.
It's unlikely, it seems, that we would return to the sort of golden era that we were talking about in 2019 of super low interest rates, but there's a chance that
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