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Economy

Income & Spending Up In The Recession, Maybe

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By Douglas A. McIntyre Updated Published
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Personal Income & Spending for January have been released.  Personal income received by the workforce came in at +0.4%, while spending for durable goods and non-durable goods in the U.S. came in at +0.6%.  Bloomberg had estimates at -0.2% for personal income, which would have been consistent with the December reading of-0.2%.  Those estimates for spending were expected to be up by 0.4% after a 1% decline in December.

Frankly, this is actually a bit surprising when you consider the data that we have seen since January. Because there is a large time delay, you might have to wait for revisions on this before declaring a real victory.  The income component also looks like there were items and adjustments in the reporting.

The other reason this is surprising is because personal saving rose 5.0% in January.  That would be the highest reading since 5.5% in March 1995.  Again, this is good on the surface, but there is an issue here on whether you trust the data as being actual apples to apples and as to whether or not the data is accurate.

Jon C. Ogg
March 2, 2009

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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.

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