Submitted: March 01, 2010
The Bureau of Economic Analysis released the personal income and personal consumption numbers for January and they show that personal consumption, which makes up 75% of the economy is back to 2006 levels. I spent a few minutes creating a graph to show what the data looks like. Take a look:
So, consumers are spending like it's 2006. That's four years of lost spending, almost half a decade. Yes, spending is trending up, as you can see, but we had a pretty brutal reset in 2009 which wiped out quite a bit of spending. We're now recovering from a much lower level.
This is why it's hard to get very excited about a booming recover. And it's also why the stock market has petered out at the 10,000 range.
You can read the rest of the data, including the actual personal income and personal consumption numbers here.