Media is reporting a pretty robust start to the shopping season and ABC is crediting some of the environment to reduced inflation. Not sure about that but nice to hear shoppers are more confident in real life than their answers on surveys. Black Friday shopping takeaways and what they mean for the economy Black Friday sales did gangbusters as the nation enters a holiday shopping season expected to test shoppers, who account for nearly three-quarters of U.S. economic activity. Consumers spent a record $9.8 billion online on Black Friday, which marks a 7.5% increase over the year prior, according to Adobe Analytics. Shopper visits, a metric used to assess in-person sales, rose 4.6% compared to a year ago -- a rate nearly double the average overall increase in foot traffic so far this year, retail data firm Sensormatic Solutions said. Even more, consumers are expected to spend between $12 billion and $12.4 billion on Cyber Monday, which would make it the biggest online shopping day ever recorded, Adobe Analytics said. A significant reduction of inflation over the past year has delivered some relief for consumers.
Unbelievable how many Americans haven’t gotten the memo … 25% Of Americans Are Still Paying Off 2022's Holiday Debt | ZeroHedge
A good summary of the republican perception disconnect from reality. Opinion | Republicans’ views of the economy are detached from reality Consumer spending is strong, and Americans are starting new businesses at the highest rates since the Census Bureau began tracking this data in 2006. Yet when pollsters ask people how they think the economy is doing, they don’t just express concern. They say the economy is terrible. The polling data doesn’t show that Americans think the economy stinks so much as it shows that Republicans say it stinks. Some partisanship has always existed in polling about the economy: When there’s a Democrat in the White House, Democrats are more likely to say the economy is good than Republicans, and both sides change their opinions when the White House changes hands. But this difference has grown in recent years — and grown unequally. A pair of economists who examined decades of polling data concluded, “While both Republicans and Democrats view the economy more favorably when their party controls the White House, the magnitude of this partisan bias is roughly two and a half times larger for Republicans than for Democrats.” We can see how that is playing out right now. In the latest edition of the University of Michigan’s Index of Consumer Sentiment, the average Democratic score is over twice as high as the Republican score. But what is most striking is just how awful Republicans say the economy is. Their index score for this month is significantly lower than the score they gave the economy in the depths of the Great Recession in 2008 and 2009, when the economy was bleeding hundreds of thousands of jobs every month.
Or deluded. It's like they are so weak-minded they can't face actual reality so they have to invent an alternate reality for themselves. The actual reality is the economy is doing ok and the president is a Dem. The right-wing alternate reality is the economy is doing horrible because the president is a Dem. It's nuts.
I think a lot of it has to do with media selection. For all their whining about CNN or NYT or Washington Post, those sources will report good economic metrics under a Republican or bad economic metrics under a Democrat. They ran numerous articles hyperanalyzing every aspect of inflation under Biden, for example. Meanwhile, you don't see similar articles featuring negative economic metrics from Fox when a Republican is in office or positive economic metrics when a Democrat is in office. For example, I googled foxnews and producer price index. The top three articles from Foxnews.com (they had the latest two editions from Fox business first) were from 2021 and 2022, when those metrics were higher. The fourth was a drop in prices...from 2018. Suddenly, main foxnews seems less interested in that metric as it declines. Meanwhile, CNN has the monthly readings when you Google it, month by month. Good news and bad news. This allows people to populate their own preferences for hard data (and create defense mechanisms when confronted with the hard data). All of it is an attempt at avoidance of cognitive dissonance.
Crazy but unsurprising, given the insane things our right-wingers on this board say on a daily basis.
the myth that this is a bad or challenged economy is just wrong US third-quarter growth revised higher; corporate profits rise strongly | Reuters The U.S. economy grew faster than initially thought in the third quarter as businesses built more warehouses and accumulated machinery equipment, but momentum appears to have since waned as higher borrowing costs curb hiring and spending. The quickest growth pace in nearly two years reported by the Commerce Department on Wednesday, however, likely exaggerated the health of the economy last quarter. When measured from the income side, economic activity increased at a moderate pace. "No sign of darkening skies for the economy in today's report, but growth is cooling," said Christopher Rupkey, chief economist at FWDBONDS in New York. "There's simply not as much wind in the economy's sails in the final quarter this year." Gross domestic product increased at a 5.2% annualized rate last quarter, revised up from the previously reported 4.9% pace, the Commerce Department's Bureau of Economic Analysis said in its second estimate of third-quarter GDP. It was the fastest pace of expansion since the fourth quarter of 2021.
Why did they use January 2020 for the start of Biden's term? Do they not know when Biden became President or do they hope that people who would do things like repost it wouldn't realize?