The Times of London says that holiday tour operators in the UK are sensing a shift in consumer behaviour because of the credit crunch. Just as the holiday season is getting under way, the strains are clear. Operators are preparing for holidays of two weeks and longer as holiday makers fight the high [...]

Hourly wages in the U.S. have not kept pace with inflation in the past 35-40 years. To the degree that U.S. households have been able to maintain higher real household earnings, it is all due to the influx of women into the workforce.
Real hourly earnings peaked at $20.30 per hour in January 1973, on [...]

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Bloomberg News reported that German retail sales for April were disappointing for the second month in a row. Retail sales growth is negative in Germany, adjusted for inflation.The reason: inflation. Consumers in Germany are losing spending power as inflation erodes the value of their earnings.
Sales, adjusted for inflation and seasonal swings, [...]

UPDATE: The latest chart on U.S. consumer credit growth is here.
I have been focusing on debt as a primary contributor to the slump the U.S. is experiencing. We’ve seen skyrocketing Debt-to-GDP and Mortgage Debt. Now, I want to look at consumer credit. The Fed releases a monthly statement showing consumer [...]

I’d say that the UK is looking a lot like the U.S. looked a year or so ago, with high consumer debt loads and high property prices. What’s the likelihood of recession. A near certainty.
“Over to the strategy team at Legal and General. They’ve charted a ‘heat map’ of factors that could push us [...]

The United States has gone from saving an average of 8-10% of income for decades to zero or negative savings today. If you look at this chart of 12-month rolling average monthly data, it looks like people actually saved more as inflation increased in the 1960s and 1970s. Then, the bottom fell [...]

Update: A more thorough analysis of the Spanish economy is at my post Outlook for Spain: Recession.
The leading Spanish Newspaper ABC is reporting that furniture sales are down 20% nationally for the first three months of 2008 due to the housing bust in Spain. As in the US, affected property markets will see the [...]

As the downturn takes hold in the U.S., the obvious dilemma for investors is knowing which sectors to avoid. Financial stocks are a sector obviously fraught with risk as they have already sustained enormous losses with many more to come as the downturn takes hold. However, on the other hand, Doug Kass, a famous [...]

I happened upon an article at “The Moderate Voice” about “Conspicuous Consumption” originally posted on UPenn’s Wharton Business School’s website. It’s a great piece of research which explains nicely in part why Blacks and Hispanics tend to have less savings and spend less on education.
Blacks and whites appear to have different spending [...]