Demographics

DEEP DIVE: US Economy Is Gen-Shaped, Not K-Shaped

Jan 9, 2026 4 min read

This is an excerpt from our January 5, 2026 Morning Briefing. The US economy's resilience is attributable primarily to robust consumer spending despite widespread concerns that rising prices have squeezed the purchasing power of lower-income consumers. As a result, many economists have warned that the so-called “K-shaped” economy isn’t sustainable. How can the economy continue to grow if more households are confronting an “affordability crisis”? Surely, it

Ed Yardeni

DEEP DIVE: The Affordability Crisis

Dec 1, 2025 7 min read paid

This is an excerpt from the December 1, 2025 Yardeni Research Morning Briefing. Affordability I: A Depressed State of Mind. Why are consumers so depressed? The monthly Consumer Optimism Index (COI), which is the average of the Consumer Sentiment Index (CSI) and the Consumer Confidence Index (CCI), fell to 69.5 in November (Fig. 1 below). That’s a level consistent with previous recession troughs in this average index. The

Ed Yardeni

Live Long And Prosper!

Apr 8, 2024 2 min read

American consumers are doing what they do best: They are consuming goods and services. Their consumption of services has been especially strong. So the demand for workers by several major services industries has been particularly strong. In turn, robust employment gains have boosted consumers’ purchasing power and spending. We have attributed some of these developments to the retiring Baby Boomer generation. This cohort is the richest generation of senior citizens

Ed Yardeni

China: The World's Largest Nursing Home

Nov 27, 2023 2 min read

China’s economy is in a property-led and fertility-led depression. That’s bad news for China’s people and for the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) but benefits countries that import Chinese goods at depressed prices. China’s weak economy is good news for the US in particular, helping to moderate goods inflation without a recession here, a.k.a. "immaculate disinflation." It would be in China’s interest

Ed Yardeni

Retiring Boomers Have More Time & Money to Spend on Services

Jun 3, 2023 2 min read

Since early last year, many economists have been forecasting that consumers will retrench, causing a recession. They may be missing the spending boom driven by Baby Boomers. As more and more of them are retiring, they are spending more on travel (including airfare, accommodations, and cruises), eating out, and health care. Employment is expanding in all these areas of the labor market. The retired Baby Boomers may no longer be

Ed Yardeni

Hard to Have a Hard Landing When Employment Is Growing

May 7, 2023 2 min read paid

The S&P 500 rallied on Friday following yet another stronger-than-expected employment report. In his press conference on Wednesday, May 3, Fed Chair Jerome Powell observed: “It’s interesting [that] we’ve raised rates by 5 percentage points in 14 months, and the unemployment rate is 3½% pretty much where it was, even lower than where it was, when we started.” On Friday, we learned that the unemployment rate

Ed Yardeni

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