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Investing

The First Quarter Should See A Surge In Consumer Spending

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By Douglas A. McIntyre Updated Published
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Consumer confidence and spending will rise very sharply over the next three months based on new data from research firm ChangeWave. The firm’s December survey of 2,690 people indicates that 35% of them will spend more over the next 90 days than they did in the same period a year ago. This number is up 2% from the research company’s November poll.

Consumer electronics purchases will be the most significant catalyst of the improvement in buying activity. Twenty-nine percent of the people queried in the ChangeWave survey say that they will spend more on electronics over the next 90 days than they did last year. That figure is a 4% improvement from November and an 18% improvement from when the same survey was taken last year. Desktop and laptop sales will also help push consumer spending higher.

ChangeWave said the conclusion of its poll was that “it has also picked up an improvement in consumer sentiment and expectations. In a nutshell, the overall 90 day outlook is as positive and hopeful as any we’ve witnessed of the past two years.”

Douglas A. McIntyre

Photo of Douglas A. McIntyre
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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