For some time, monthly consumer retail spending reports from the Census Bureau have had a touch of amazement about them. Many watching the numbers marveled at how they continued to climb even as so many people complained about the economy.
However, according to a Moody’s Analytics analysis of Federal Reserve data, the bustling economy is not a story of all consumers spending shoulder-to-shoulder. Instead, according to a Wall Street Journal report on Moody's numbers, the tale is of how statistical distributions are always critical in looking at data.
The top 10% of earners — households making $250,000 a year or more — are responsible for 49.7% of all consumer spending. Thirty years ago, the amount was about 36%.
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