Bob Fraser points to hard data showing U.S. consumers are financially strong: high savings rates, robust spending, elevated checking balances, low debt burdens. Yet consumer sentiment is unusually negative. He blames political polarization and social media noise, not the actual economics.
and I can only go off the data. And so I found over the years that there's a lot of noise and there's a lot of data. And if you pay attention to the data, the story just emerges and the noise can be ignored. And the consumer has been doing insanely well, really since mid-2010s. And you look at savings rates are good. Consumer spending is incredibly strong. Checking accounts are high, debt service is low. All these things that drive the consumer, except they're grumpy. That's the big negative is consumer sentiment is in the toilet. Everybody is doing super well and they're super grumpy. And it's really anomalous. We haven't seen this. And I think it has more to do with the political divide and social media and other things than it does, you know, in the past, just pure economic reality.
