The well-known pollster Scott Rasmussen has a new poll out today. The publicly available summary includes the following:
Most Americans plan to spend less money on gifts than they did last year, and fewer adults will be doing their shopping on the Internet.
A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that 62% of American Adults say they’ll spend less on gifts than they did a year ago, while just 11% say they’ll spend more.
The spending data is generally consistent with Gallup’s daily polling of 1500 adults, which shows self-reported discretionary spending unchanged from last year, despite higher prices for most things, and which shows a continual feeling that the pollee’s economic circumstances have declined steadily since the onset of the “Great Recession”.
Rasmussen’s finding that Internet shopping may be peaking would be a surprise. It’ll be interesting to see how that plays out.
For now, the main economic variables I see for the United States relate to the fact that since the (technical) end of the recession in mid-2009, wage and interest income have not risen much while the cost of living has risen a good deal more; thus, objective economic circumstances have worsened. Worsening the situation is the continued decline in real estate values. So people’s main source of wealth – their home- has lost value in nominal dollars at the same time that on average their spending power out of current income has materially worsened.
Please note that none of the above data have anything to do with the fact that Greece has been shown to be a deadbeat borrower or that Europe appears to have entered into a recession. The U.S. has a GDP that exceeds that of the entire Eurozone. Only a modest part of the American economy is comprised of exports, a minority of exports go to the Eurozone, and the great majority of those will continue even if European GDP declines a few percent. Plus, a deceleration of European economic prospects has helped allow for lower Brent crude prices, and investment capital has left Europe for America, thus allowing greater governmental spending (or a slower level of cutbacks, as the case may be).
If America should be found to be in recession around now, much of the media will somehow blame Europe. But the fault, dear reader, would be in ourselves.
The capital had been squandered/stolen well before Bernie Madoff’s announcement that the money was gone. But the impoverishment was only felt by the investors after he came clean.
The capital that is represented by European government bonds has been squandered and stolen too. The banks holding these bonds have come to realise this with the Greek default. They now understand, as did Madoff’s investors after the announcement, that their sovereign debts, Greek, Italian, whatever, have no value.
There are huge amounts of European sovereign debt sitting on US bank balance sheets. Let’s see how long it will take US citizens to feel the impoverishment.
Last years Holiday jump was from pent-up demand, from previous years of austerity. I predicted that from my own families buying. This year the demand is not present and I expect a very sober retail season.
I have this very nagging feeling that an avalanche of debt has built and about to comedown, worldwide, the Politicos are just deer in the headlights.
CNN had a good show on Gerrymandering yesterday.
We the People have to get mad as Hell (2012) and throw the bums out of both parties.
There has to be a fundamental shift back to Rational Economics or we go Socialist.
My daughter tells me about so many of her friends families that have second homes in Costa Rica – hmmm.
Californio- I have heard the same about Costa Rica, including one man who does business w Americans and was an American who said, who needs American citizenship or a home in the US. SO he provides low cost, high quality financial services for Americans from there.