For some time, monthly consumer retail spending reports from the Census Bureau have had a touch of amazement about them. Many would strong economic growth would be spread close to evenly across each wealth class.
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 The Wall Street Journal 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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In a U.S. economy where such activity is responsible for roughly 69% of gross domestic product that is a big deal. A tenth of households drive 34.3% of GDP by themselves.
“When you look at the dynamics, I think there certainly is evidence to support that,” Michael Brown, principal U.S. economist at Visa, told Marketplace.
The Journal said that according to Moody’s, the highest earners increased their spending by 12% between September 2023 and September 2024, the latter being the most recent data available. Simultaneously, spending by working-class and middle-class consumers dropped over the same range.
Over the last four years, prices rose by 21%. The top 10% of households increased their spending by 58%. The bottom 80% spent 25% more than four years ago.
“The finances of the well-to-do have never been better, their spending never stronger and the economy never more dependent on that group,” Zandi told the Journal.
Inflation has hit lower-income households — which relatively speaking seems to be almost all of them — the hardest. It was one of the largest issues voters had in the run-up to the presidential election last year.
An examination of data from the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta and curated by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, median household real income has seen annual increases of something under 2%. The 25th percentile of the population has hovered over the last few years at losing from 5% to 10% of their incomes annually. The top 75% had been seeing rises between roughly 10% and 13%. The spread of economic power increases quickly and to extreme degrees.
The danger is that the spending of the wealthiest could be buoyed by the values of their stock portfolios. But that makes the economy more vulnerable should there be a shakeout.
“I mean if their spending is being driven by record stock prices, I wouldn’t count on that for sustaining long-term economic growth,” Moody's chief economist Mark Zandi said to Marketplace.
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