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A deep and enduring “vibecession” – Partisan differences are increasingly dominating perceptions of the economy.
By almost every metric, the US economy is doing quite well at the moment. There are many ways to evaluate economic vitality. The most obvious is the headline unemployment rate, which was used throughout the Great Recession to monitor the (slow) recovery. Today, though, unemployment is hovering near record lows at <4%.
Beyond this, there are somewhat nerdier, more technical measurements that still capture important aspects of the economy. Things like inflation, GDP growth, and the stock market. All of these indicators are somewhere between “good” and “great”. Inflation has come way down and is now around 3.7%. Core inflation, a better measurement of long-term inflation that excludes volatile commodities like gas prices, is even lower at around 2.5%, essentially hitting the Fed’s 2% target. GDP growth is surprisingly high for Q3 at 4.9%. The stock market is also doing fairly well, with the S&P500 being less than 10% off its all-time high at the end of 2021 and being well-above the pre-COVID high in Jan 2020.
Drilling even deeper, at this point you start to get the indicators people and the media can “fish” for in order to find bad news. Things like median wage growth, wealth inequality, and prime-age labor participation rate. The thinking with these metrics is that even if the more commonly cited stats are doing well, they might not paint a full picture. For instance, if the economy is growing but the rich are eating all the gains, then things like wage growth and inequality can show how most people aren’t benefitting. Likewise, if the unemployment rate has fallen because people have become discouraged and just don’t bother looking for work any more, then labor participation can show what’s really going on. The steelman of these metrics is that they can be helpful in painting a fuller picture, although in practice I’ve often only seen them used when people are willing to use motivated reasoning to paint the economy as underperforming (e.g. politicians, doomers, or the media just trying to create a story). That said, even by these metrics the US economy is doing well. Median wage growth is very high and is well-above inflation. Regular Americans are getting richer, and wealth inequality has fallen.. The prime age employment rate is also near record highs.
In spite of all of this though, many peoples’ opinions of the economy remain in the dumps. The consumer sentiment index has recovered only slightly from its record low a few months ago, but is still barely better than during the worst parts of the Great Recession. What gives? Well, there’s quite a bit of evidence that it’s just partisan emotional expression, i.e. “vibes”. There’s plenty of data showing that Americans tend to rate the national economy as being much worse than their own personal financial circumstances. Kevin Drum has some evidence that this national-personal split is mostly being driven by Republicans. 71% of Democrats and 57% of Republicans say the economy is doing well in terms of their personal situation. But in terms of the nation as whole, 58% of Democrats and just 5% (!!!) of Republicans say the economy is doing well on a national scale. So you have this goofy scenario where Republicans across the country say things are going well for them individually, but as a collective things must simply disastrous. Where is this “disaster” occurring? “Well, not here, but it’s surely happening somewhere”. The 5% mark is particularly interesting because it perfectly matches Republican’s approval rating of Biden. In other words, it seems like asking people how well the economy is doing is just a proxy for “what do you think of the current sitting president”. I’d doubt the numbers would correlate this perfectly all the time, but there’d still be a significant relationship. Whichever party doesn’t control the White House will see the economy in much more pessimistic terms.
Currently this is just applied to Republicans being pessimistic, but it’s almost certainly symmetrical. When Republicans eventually take back control of the presidency, it’s not hard to predict that Democrats will suddenly think the sky is falling in economic terms.
The reason the feel of this economy is off is because people can still remember how things were going Pre-Covid, and they have a keen recollection of how much was 'lost' during the Covid period, and one can easily argue that we have not yet 're-established' the baseline from before, and with the current interest rates, we might not be able to anytime soon.
What is absolutely fair to say is that we avoided a serious recession resulting from Covid and the attendant restrictions.
But if you're an average American, you've likely depleted most of your personal savings., you've got a high car payment ("affordable" used cars aren't a thing anymore), and may be in default on the loan, your rent has increased around 30% since 2019.
Of course with savings depleted, more people will start financing purchases/using credit cards. In a rising-interest-rate environment.
Oh, and Student Loan payments just resumed after a LONG hiatus.. It's hard to feel good about higher wages if you can directly observe that most of the extra money is going to service debt and you can't actually put much of it away for later. It feels even worse if your overall debt continues to rise so you're treading water rather than making actual headway towards reducing your indebtedness.
So if you were motivated to convince people they were doing well, economically speaking, you could isolate the variable declaring that wages are up so you can say "stop complaining things have reverted to the pre-covid norm!"
But if you were to ask a simple-ish question: "Are you materially better or worse off today than you were in 2019?" I would hazard a guess that most people are 'struggling' to maintain their standard of living more than before, and this feeling comes through.
Now, my own personal concern is that we've already used up a bunch of economic 'slack' during Covid times, Putin started further troubles, and oh golly gee the Middle East is now acting up again. So at some point we have to start rebuilding our reserves for some possible future shock, and few seem interested in doing that. Nowhere is this more apparent than the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, which was depleted to historic lows and, as of yet, has not begun to be refilled.
It is nowhere near empty, mind, I just find this illustrative of the situation. We burned a lot of spare capacity and we still seem to be teetering on a precipice, what else can we deploy if we actually tip over the edge?
Not sure what you mean by affordable, but they very much are. Just go on the internet and you can find used cars in working order which do good MPG for pretty damn cheap. Sure, most of them might be on the older side and a bit scratched, but that's hardly that important.
About 8 years ago I bought a '98 Honda Accord with 65k miles on it for a hair over $4k.
1.5 years ago I purchased a 2012 Honda Civic with 80k miles on it for a hair over $15k.
It is almost literally impossible these days to find a vehicle with <100k miles for <$10k.
If you find an 'affordable' car (read: could be purchased by a college student working part time) then it is going to be in rough shape, probably been in an accident, with >100k miles, which is to say it's going to come with a hefty maintenance/repair bill built in.
Car repairs are more expensive now, too.
https://www.cnbc.com/2023/07/25/car-repair-costs-are-up-almost-20percent-over-the-past-year-heres-why.html
It's not quite as bad in the midwest, though there's a lot of cruft, crappy manufacturers and (not always bad, but high-risk) salvage titles for more reputable builders.
But yeah, prices have absolutely skyrocketed. Most of these would have been advertised at about half of their current prices, and most dealers would be far more willing to negotiate, even as recently at 2015; if you go back to pre-cash4clunkers the difference is even more staggering.
Coastals might be able to hit that at 9k (though prices are before fees!), but if you don't want a used police car (don't do it) or lease car, you're probably more screwed.
I saw the 2014 Nissan Versa with 85k miles for about $7k and I click in and it says on there "1 or more accidents reported."
Anytime you see something that seems like a deal, there's gonna be some catch or other.
I'm seeing that the prices on those cars have come down over the past couple months, so I do wonder if there's signs of easing of prices in the near future.
I just distinctly remember when I was buying my Civic that I overheard the buyer in the next booth over talking with the salesperson about a $500+/mo payment on a 72 month note, for a used truck, and just wondered if it was me or everybody else that was losing their mind.
Also heavily annoyed that I've already had to dump $2000 worth of repairs into the Civic to keep it roadworthy, but I'm at least confident I can get another 100k miles out the engine w/maintenance if I were forced to.
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