Economic Charts

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Wednesday, November 24, 2010

Monthly Personal Income, Disposable Income, Spending and Savings

The Personal Income, Disposable Income, Spending and Savings report was released covering the month of October.  The forecast for personal spending called for a 0.5% increase Month over Month, but it actually came in at 0.4% showing a slight slowdown in consumption.  The reports have gone through months and months of revisions again, therefore the data is changed (I have no idea why they revise numbers back to April, you'd think they would be pretty concrete by now, but they do).  As you can see all categories are up from the previous month, just not as much as economists would like.
The Personal Savings data show that savings is up slightly from the previous month, but revisions all the way back to April have changed the Personal Savings data wildly.
Now obviously Keynesian's want personal savings to be down (as that means people are not spending) and spending to be up much higher to spur a recovery.  Unfortunately as we are high levels of unemployment and everybody is worried about the future, the money is being reigned in perpetuating the problem (maybe we should consider a new system that doesn't involve spending yourself into oblivion).

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