Shoppers Are Happier and Have More Money to Spend

On June 26 the BEA released their “Personal Income and Outlay Report: May 2009” and it had lots of good news. Total personal income leapt by 1.4 percent or $167.1 billion in May from April to a record SAAR of $12.3 trillion.

Disposable personal income shot up by 1.6 percent in May from April or $178.1 billion to a new record of $11.1 trillion. Personal savings shot up to 6.9 percent of disposable personal income, the highest ever recorded in the fifty-year history of the data series. Click here to read the full post and comment (Insights subscribers) »

Some Good News on the Most Important Parts of the Economy

On March 2, BEA released some surprisingly good news on personal income and personal consumption expenditures (PCE) for January 2009. After four months of increasingly gloomy reports, the first data for 2009 looked much better.

Total disposable personal income, the raw material for PCE that accounts for over 70.0 percent of real GDP, rose to a record level of $8.9 trillion in January. That drove real PCE to $8.2 trillion, above the fourth quarter 2008 level.

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