Here is a great summary from the WSJ: Americans built up about $2.1 trillion in excess savings during the pandemic and its immediate aftermath, a cushion for household budgets and a boost for consumer spending. Since August 2021, they’ve drawn down about $1.9 trillion of that. “This implies that there is less than $190 billion of excess savings remaining in the aggregate economy. Should the recent pace of drawdowns persist—for example, at average rates from the past three, six or 12 months—aggregate excess savings would likely be depleted in the third quarter of 2023,” Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco economists Hamza Abdelrahman and Luiz Oliveira write in a blog post.
The dwindling pandemic savings during 2023 makes me wonder if that is correlated with the dwindling industrial demand that started at the beginning in 2023 and continues here in Los Angeles. Tenant demand for warehouses has fallen sharply this year. Buyer demand has been dampened by the interest rate increases. If the pandemic savings do run out this year then I wonder if consumer spending will follow. If that is the case and consumer spending accounts for about ⅔ of GDP then a slowdown could materialize.
