WASHINGTON D.C. - Bring out the POS’s and lock in your promotions. It looks like, according to the Wall Street Journal’s (WSJ) Josh Mitchell, consumers are looking to spend.
According to Mitchell’s recent report on U.S. Department of Commerce’s personal income and outlays report for last month, seasonally adjusted personal spending across the board spiked about 0.9 percent, the most significant jump since August of 2009.
“U.S. consumers are back in the game in a big way,” Millan Mulraine, a TD Securities Economist, said in a note to clients, according to the report. “The robust rebound in spending provides some much needed confidence that the economic recovery is continuing to build on the positive momentum of recent months.”
It looks as though the desire to spend could be correlated with having the increased budget to do so. WSJ reported that personal income saw a healthy back-to-back increase for both April and May of this year.
“Personal income, including wages and government aid, climbed 0.5% in May after rising at the same pace in April,” Mitchell writes. “That marked the best two-month increase in incomes since early 2014 and suggested a firming labor market is leading employers to slowly raise wages.”
The window, however, could be a brief one. Patterns reportedly suggest that after big surges spending tends to recede, and while wallets grew a bit over the last couple of months, the Department of Commerce also found that savings accounts decreased.
For the time being, however, it appears to be some good news for economic spending.
To read Josh Mitchell’s full article for the Wall Street Journal, click here.
