From the article:
He’s blaming a list of headwinds weighing on consumers including [1] inflation, [2] higher interest rates, [3] federal budget wrangling, [4] polarized politics and [5] student loan repayments — and now new [6] global tensions connected to violence in Israel.
1 and 2 being handled by the Federal Reserve.
3 is being screwed up by the House Republicans, they need to get their act together.
4, when has polarized politics affected consumer spending in the aggregate? There is some worry about businesses splitting into "red team" and "blue team" (e.g., the recent Mulvaney/Bud Lite example), but that's just shifting spending from one vendor to another vendor.
Biden is handling this. The GOP can help or get out of the way.
Will this have an even bigger impact on aggregate consumption than Russia invading Ukraine, or just a recency bias on the part of the interviewee? Haven't check on oil/energy prices lately but it doesn't look like oil/energy prices are being affected as much as when Russia invaded Ukraine.
“That sort of pileup wears on the consumer and makes them wary,” the former Walmart U.S. CEO told CNBC’s “Fast Money” on Monday. “For the first time in a long time, there’s a reason for the consumer to pause.”
The interviewee has short memory. Consumers sure had reason to pause quite recently, in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, before world governments started pumping large amounts of money into the economy. Even then, consumers had to pause for a while for the lack of supply in the midst of various lockdowns and movement control orders.
