News analysis
The Commerce Department reports that inflation-adjusted spending declined by 0.4 percent in May. It’s the first decline in real spending since December and a real foreshadowing of what’s coming. The trajectory is now well-established: depleted savings, real income flat and declining, consumers worrying, investors rethinking everything, and the public ever more demoralized and frustrated.
It’s a scramble for resources at a time of enormous fiscal and monetary fakery that led people to believe that everything was going to be just fine, and that the magic of the printing press and Congressional profligacy would render economic logic null and void….