Personal Income and Outlays
The Personal Income and Outlays, report for August 2020 shows increasing stress on consumers.
Real PCE vs Real DPI 2020 Detail
Increasing Consumer Stress
Personal income decreased 2.7 percent while consumer spending increased 1.0 percent in August.
Real disposable income declined 3.5% while real spending rose 0.7%.
Stimulus Runs Out
The Covid $600 stimulus checks ended July 25.
The $300 stimulus checks ended September 5.
For details, please see Trump’s $300 Lost Wage Assistance Benefit Ended in 10 States
Fiscal stimulus has has run its course.
Mish
Say’s law (“demand creates its own supply) has been denigrated:
“…a product is no sooner created than it, from that instant, affords a market for other products to the full extent of its own value.” — Jean Baptiste Say, “Of the Vent or Demand for Products” A Treatise on Political Economy (4th ed.), translated from the French by C .R. Prinspe (Philadelphia, 1830), Ch. 15.
Chairman Jerome H. Powell has had a negative outlook:
Powell said: “My sense is that more fiscal support is likely to be needed.” Powell warned that “overall activity remains well below its level before the pandemic and the path ahead remains highly uncertain.”
More scammers caught. Humanity sucks.
Speaking of stimulus funds “running out”, I wonder how many others in the financial industry are going to get caught red-handed in camming government funds meant for businesses?
JPMorgan Finds More Than 500 Workers Got U.S. Virus Relief Funds
September 30, 2020, 5:35 PM EDT
That’s a shocking graph. Normally in a downturn, personal income falls, or at least, stops rising. They gave so many benefits out that personal income had a massive spike upwards, even as spending dropped hard. Wow. I’ve never seen anything like that before. No wonder the stock market is up. All those saving had to affect a number of things. I presume personal debt dropped a lot, too.
Note core PCE y/y is on a relentless march, so the fed is going with zero rates for years because we are .4% behind the devaluation of out money?
PCE, excluding food and energy 0.9 1.0 1.1 1.4 1.6
“They don’t give a f**k about you. They don’t care at all. At all.”
— George Carlin
The only thing they do care about is keeping this obscenely grotesque Frankenstein of a financial/monetary system going and thereby protecting the banks that OWN the Fed.
What could possibly account for this?
I just came back from Whalemart and they FINALLY have a decent stock of toilet paper and not a day too soon either. But is also now $15 where it was $9 last year. Soon it will be cheaper to use dollar bills. Had to stop and buy a carton of cigarettes also, they were $60.99 in April, today $68.87, a haircut, from $12 at SuperCuts in January to $18 now. Gas for my car is now back to $3, hamburger is double what I was paying at the start of the year, we in Florida have been told to prepare for towering increases of 20% and more for car insurance on our renewal dates.
Incomes can stay the same but if the prices for the things you must buy are going up by double or even triple digits then that will show up as increased spending even though you might be buying less.
It’s called “a lower standard of living” and it’s what’s for dinner – brought to you by your great pals at The Federal Reserve.
I haven’t seen any price increases here at all, but then, I’m hardly spending anything. Last time i filled up, it was $1.899. I’m due to fill up this week, though, so we’ll see. Insurance, IDK on my personal policy, but it looks like my commercial policy is going down a little.
Haircuts and hamburgers don’t surprise me if they are up, as their volume is down and expenses are up. I have been cutting my own and eating at home, so I’m part of the reason why their volume is down.
I went to fill up here and it is now $2.999, aren’t we in the same county? I am seriously thinking of cutting my own hair also, but damn it is so hard to get right. Pretty much all you can do on your own is a buzz cut and let it grow out an inch or so then do it again. Food though, anyone that says it is not up by whopping double digits is just flat out full of crap. They obviously do not know how to calculate price increases.
For what it’s worth, I checked for lowest gas prices in Council Bluffs, St. Joe Missouri, and Lincoln, and all came in at $1.85. Other places i tried came out between $2-3. Seems prices in different areas are very different.
I give myself a scissors cut, and it ends up looking about like the barber. I’ve watched them so many times, I try to do the same thing. I do it by feel, not by looking, though. If I look in the mirror it seriously messes me up. My cuts aren’t perfect, though. This time i have a bald spot on the back, lol. Last time it was messed up around one ear. I will gladly pay the barber again when this is over.
I know one of the other regular posters lives near me in Florida, I thought it was you. Regular here is $2.20 but my car requires premium and that is EIGHTY cents per gallon more and a total rip off too. In Oregon premium was 30 cents more, and was only $1.89 when I moved away at the end of March. Now paying $3.
Paid $3.10 for premium at Costco in CA the other day.
I moved away from California (my home state) in 1991 because I was priced out, rent is actually higher in Oregon though, buying is more in California than nearly the whole country except maybe Honolulu. I might as well return except I did buy a great house and love the place. In Sonoma where I used to live it would be $1 million easily.
But it is like there is no reasonable place to live anymore except maybe some true shitholes. Maybe Fargo, or Camden.
Prices are up but there are still bargains to be had. We have a store called Stater Brothers in CA, great meat department, ribeyes $3.99/lb. for example.
I had a car that ‘required’ premium which I paid for a few years. Then premium hit $4-5 in CA, so I ‘downgraded’ to regular. I noticed absolutely no difference in performance or knocking or gas consumption and the car lasted for 8 years after that, so you may be ripping yourself off.
Luckily in Amerika, one doesn’t need income in order to be able to spend.
And in many cities, you just walk into the store and take what you want!
Amerika really is Utopia…
I finally ran my PPP account to zero…..Now I get to see if forgiveness is real. I understand it’s been a difficult path to negotiate so far. I’m looking to get my documentation done in the next couple of day and apply. We shall see.
As a mom and pop with 10 employees (including me), I got 84K, which was supposed to be 8 weeks payroll (accurate except we had to lay people off so it was less for a while). I stretched it out all summer…..it definitely saved our butt…so far.
Mine was smaller than yours at $60,000. I used it as intended, over 8 weeks, then cut payroll. Since I didn’t have many non-payroll expenses, I will probably end up paying back about $10,000 of it. If I compute forgiveness over 8 weeks, it will be because I didn’t have non-payroll expenses. If I do it over the longer period, I’ll owe since I will owe a penalty because people’s pay dropped.
It helped my employees more than it helped me. I warned them that when the 8 weeks was up, their pay was dropping, so they saved it, and used it as needed, and it made their life easier.
We had to lay people off because the money was very late in coming. We are still not at 100% of our previous staff. We made sure to spend it all on payroll. Clearly documented everything.
We could wait til near year-end and do enough hiring to bring it to full pre-covid levels…..but since social distancing makes it impossible to run at full capacity, I am going to go ahead and apply for forgiveness and state that we can’t go back to full employment.
I applied on a Wednesday. I got it back Thursday afternoon with note that I forgot to initial in one place. I resubmitted in Thursday afternoon at 5pm. On Friday at 8 AM the $60k was in my account. In retrospect, I’d have probably done better had I done the other program, the one where you get up to a $10k credit per employee if your sales fall over 50%, but with that one you had to front the money, and claim the credit after the fact.
Full disclosure we got a $150K EIDL loan….ironically used 100% so far to pay taxes, since I robbed my tax account to make payroll while I waited over 2 months to get my PPP money.
You guys should replace humans with robots!
How Robots Became Essential Workers in the COVID-19 Response
Autonomous machines proved their worth in hospitals, offices, and on city streets
By Erico Guizzo and Randi Klett
30 Sep 2020 | 15:00 GMT
What I want is a self-driving car so I can sleep on the way to work.