Moody's Talks - Inside Economics - CPI, Consumers, and Cosmo

Episode Date: January 14, 2022

Michael McNamara, Senior Principal for MasterCard, joins Mark, Ryan, and Cris to discuss the state of the American consumer and the impact of Omicron on spending. Full episode transcript Questions or Comments, please email us at [e-mail]. We would love to hear from you.  To stay informed and follow the insights of Moody's Analytics economists, visit Economic View. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Welcome to Inside Economics. I'm Mark Zandi, the chief economist of Moody's Analytics. And I'm joined by my two co-hosts. Chris DeReedies. Chris is, of course, the deputy chief economist. Hello, Chris. Hi, Mark. You look at your, it looks like you're in an atypical venue.

Got a bunch of doors behind you. Is that typical? I usually see, like, their child's pictures and paintings. Not today. I'm at home in the attic. The bullies at home today because of a COVID outbreak at his school. Oh, I see. He's safe and sound, though.

He's safe and, yeah, yeah, one of his classmates. So, but a significant ripple effects, right? All the parents got a notice early this morning. You know, classes canceled for today. So they shut down the school. Not the entire school. No, no, he's classroom. Oh, he's classroom.

Oh, that's interesting. That's their protocol. COVID response. Yeah. Interesting. And you'll go back to school, he'll go back to school tomorrow or you don't know. Well, tomorrow's Saturday. Oh, that's right.

Well, you know, you know, I work every single day, Chris. So it's all Friday. I know. I know. But the preschools don't. So, yeah. That's a good point. Good point.

Very good. Monday's holiday, Tuesday we'll see. That's right. Monday's Martin Luther King Day, right? Correct? Yeah. That's right. Yeah.

And we got Ryan. Ryan Sweet. Ryan's director of real-time economics. And I was chatting with you earlier this week. Your was, no, no, it was Dante, whose child was at home. Did you have a disruption too due to COVID, Ryan? No, so far, so good. Yeah.

Yeah, we've been good. And you, you are safe and sound. I would know your wife got sick with COVID. My wife got it from her office. It's a very small veterinary hospital, so it just spread like wildfire. So we're to go through quarantining and everything. But everyone's good now. No one else in the house got it.

Wow. That's great. Good. And we have a special venues. Pardon me? Speaking of new venues, somebody decided to flee Philadelphia because they can't handle a cold. Yeah, I know. You know, on Saturday this past week ago now, almost hard to believe.

but my wife and I and I are two dogs got into our car 3.30 in the morning and drove all the way to Florida, 16-hour drive. And you'll be proud of me. I did it by myself, by myself. Not that my wife isn't a good driver. I just, I get very tense, though, when she's driving. And we made it all the way down. I tell you, Ryan, I could be, if I wasn't an economist, I could be a trucker, no problem, really. I love it. I love it. I love the tunes. I listen to three of our podcasts on the way. Might make more money. You might make more money trucking that. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. And that's Michael McNamara. Mike is our guest today. And welcome, Michael.

Thank you very much. Should I call you Mike or Michael or doesn't matter or you good with those? Yeah, I'm good either way. A lot of a lot of folks just call me Mac. Mac. Oh, I love that. We're going to call you Matt. Yeah. Mac comes to us from MasterCard. And Mac and I, I've never called you Matt, Mac, but you and I have known each other for probably a decade or so, maybe even longer than that. That's probably a little longer than that at this point. Yeah. I'm going to join you in the shuffleboard courts down there pretty soon. Yeah, I get it why people come down here in the winter, though. I tell you. It's, you know, pretty nice. And of course, I'm able to do, I did it last winter in this winter because of, you know, we're all kind of sheltering in place. All my, I had a whole set of travel.

I don't know about you, Mac, but I had all set all set of travel plan for January and February. And everything is gotten canceled except for events in Florida. Go figure. I got a couple of data points that might be interesting about that. We can talk about that a little later about how retail sales. are performing north versus south oh that that would be interesting that would be very interesting but uh yeah i i think i get the iron man award because i moved from new york it wasn't cold enough there so i moved up to boston you're going the opposite direction yeah where i'm going away from you right now

it's going to get a tent windshield tomorrow and uh you know my goodness my goodness yeah goodness well so it's so good to have you on uh with us and it's it's a perfect uh day for it we we got retail sales today from from census and so that's for the month of December so we got now a read on Christmas sales and of course you've been managing the spending pulse data for MasterCard for for that for over a decade and that provides a lot of insight a lot of insight and can you just give us a sense of that that data that data set the sure the spending pulse I'd be very curious and just anything you can tell us about it sure so I've actually been doing that I started it about 20 years ago.

Oh, 20. Okay. This will be, yeah, this is my anniversary this year. And what we do is we take the aggregate data that runs across MasterCard. We filter out the noise in the data that's due to MasterCard activity that can skew the results. And then so you end up with a nice sample of retail sales activity that's occurring in the United States. And then in any other markets we decide to analyze. And we pipe in third party data on other payment forms, so other non-mastercard transaction.

types of information. The aggregate is what we report. So anything that's a spending false number is our estimate for total sales across what we say all payment forms. It's not a credit card number. It's not a master card number. It's actually our estimate for total retail sales. Got it. Oh, I got it. So you're using the master card data, but other data sources, you bring it together and you come up with an estimate of what you think the total pie is. Exactly. And then we're able to do it. So we're able to slice and dice it a whole bunch of different ways. So, you know, that's what I was talking about, north, south, and different markets and channels and sectors. So we can dig into that if you want throughout the call. Oh, no, absolutely.

We're going to, because of the, you know, of course, we're going to talk about retail sales and other statistics and play our statistics game, which I'll describe in a minute. But then we want to dig deep into the consumer, you know, how are things going, again, apropos because of the holiday sales. And, of course, a lot of debate about Omicron and what kind of impact that's So how timely is your data? Do you get data weekly, daily? Are you looking at it real time? Yeah, we're able to see every day. And then there are rolling updates that occur. Typically in many of our systems, we have a major update once a week. I'm able to see things behind the scenes. So I'm able to see things a little bit more frequently than that. But it's typically a weekly update, but you can see daily detail.

It's actually pretty cool. If we had a graphics kind of thing, maybe at some point I could show you. You can actually watch the retail economy almost like a weather map now, where you can see a storm move across the country. I call it animating the economy. And it really opens up some interesting analytic doors that really we weren't able to do before because we didn't either have the data or the technology. But now that you have the combination of both, a whole new world of an analysis. analysis that we're able to do. Cool.

When you say kind of tracking weather, is it because of the virus because of the pandemic? You can see the pandemic effects in different parts of the country? Is there broader than that? Oh, okay. Well, we can actually see. We have this new capability that we've been developing that allows us to study different types of events. So we have what we call scheduled structured events, things like the football games.

games this weekend or the NCAA tournament, that kind of stuff or concert. And then we have what we call unscheduled, unstructured events, weather, COVID, you know, to some extent, some of the stimulus activity would probably be more unscheduled unstructured because you didn't anticipate it ahead of time. So it really opens up doors and you can quantify the impact of things. So if a hurricane comes up the coast, we can actually put a dollar value on retail sales on what Oh, wow. It was kind of some fun stuff.

I was looking at some concerts, Taylor Swift versus BTS. Does anybody know who BTS is? I do not. No. Is that a rapper or? No, Mark is actually probably not. He's not telling the truth. It's K-pop.

It's probably the most famous band in the world. But they both the Korean band, the Korean band? Yes. Yeah, yeah, right. Yeah. That was a good thing playing at all. how. So I, you know, I'm like, you know, cut off line. You listen to it all the way down to Florida.

Oh, yeah. He probably pulled over a couple times. That's definitely true. But it's cool. You can actually contrast and compare what is a Red Sox game worth to the immediate local economy around Fenway on a Wednesday versus a Saturday. Or like I was saying, you can compare what is a Pearl Jam concert bring in versus a Taylor Swift, you know. That is so cool. It's really just scratching the surface. of kind of new things that we can do. If I tell you, Mac, if I had that data, I don't think I'd get any work done. I'd be looking at it all day long. It sounds so cool.

You can tell I didn't shave today. Yes, there you go. Yeah, that is really, very cool. Okay, well, we'll come back to that. Well, we got two big economic releases this week. We had retail sales today. We're talking on Friday. And the other was CPI, consumer price inflation.

There's a lot of other stuff that came out too, but those were the two biggies. Maybe, Ryan, you want to give us a sense of both those surveys? And I know I'm guessing some of us may have picked statistics from those surveys for the game. So I won't ask you to go too deep, but you want to just give us a general sense of what your take is on both those surveys? And I'll do it without giving you any numbers because I don't want to take anybody's number for the game. Okay. But starting with the CPI, I think the takeaway is. It was another hot month of inflation, but the worst is likely behind us.

So I think in our forecast, we have inflation peaking right about now, and it's going to start to decelerate because supply chain issues should start getting resolved a little bit over time. And energy prices, they're bouncing around again, but overall, just between supply chain, stress and energy, that's adding about four percentage points to, well, I've said I was going to use numbers, but I use the number. That's a good number. Yeah, so more than half of the inflation that we've seen is because of those two areas, supply chains and energy. So CPI inflation, just to make that clear, I'm going to use another number. CPI inflation year over year,

and CPI is consumer price index inflation, 7% on the nose year over year through December, and you're saying of that 7%, four percentage points is related to end. energy, higher oil prices, natural gas prices, and higher prices for goods that have been disrupted because of supply chain issues. Yeah. Vehicles. The poster shot. Yeah.

Use car prices in particular. But, you know, audio equipment, other things like that that are being, electronics are being disrupted by the supply chains, that's adding a lot to inflation. Got it. So if I, it's a other way of thinking, no energy effects, which related to the pandemic, no supply chain effects obviously related to the pandemic, inflation would be three percent. So we wouldn't even be probably talking about it. Talking about it, no.

Yeah. Okay. And that's probably where we're headed by the end of the year. Probably closer to 3 percent than where we are now. Okay. Okay. Anything else on the CPI that you want to bring up? No, I think we.

Okay. The one thing on the CPI that is, well, there's a bunch of things that are making me nervous. One is around rents, and we talked a little bit about that on the last podcast. What happened with rank growth, the rent of shelter CPI? What did that look like? From month to month, they're really sticky. So, you know, when you forecast the CPI and you do the bottom up approach, rents are usually what they were broke in the prior month.

And it was, again, 0.4%. Whether you're looking at tenants or owner's equivalent rent, that's going to pick back up. I think we talked about it last week. that there's this lagged effect between, you know, some of the alternative data on rents, if you look at Zillow, they've been growing really, really quickly. That's going to show up in the CPI this summer. Got it. We'll have goods, inflation coming down, and then we'll have some services, inflation accelerating.

But on net, we're going to see overall inflation begin to moderate. Hey, Mac, I know you look at all this data really closely, too. On the CPI, is there anything that kind of stood out for you on that release? Yeah, there are a couple things there. One is some of the food-related increases. I think there was about a 12.5% increase in meat and those types of goods and sorry. I had a steak last night and I can say it was expensive. Hopefully that was no one statistic for the game 12.5%.

No, we're good. Sorry about that. No, no, it's okay. Okay. Yeah, good. And but what's going to happen to the food sector as we moved through, the next year or so because some of those inflation pressures, I'm trying to remember some of my information about meats, but I want to say if you're talking about chicken or poultry, you're

talking about two to three months to get some kind of a flock adjustment. For pork, I want to say it's like to nine months. For beef, I think it's like 18 months or something like that to get the herd kind of in line with demand. So those could be sticky. and those could be with us for a while. But the other thing about that sector, just to go a little bit on a slight tangent, is that we're going to have to look at how the comps were versus SNAP and the different assistant programs

as we move through 2022. In the Q2 and in Q4, there are different government assistant programs that help elevate some of the numbers in the grocery sector. And we're going to have to just pay attention that in 2022, when you're looking at your year over years, you know, Q2 and Q4,

might have some pressure because of that you're going to be lapping the assistance programs that started last year. Oh, that's interesting. So the SNAP is the supplemental nutritional assistance program. That's kind of the old food stamps. Yeah, if you talk to, yeah, if you talk to any of the grocery, the grocery folks or, you know, anybody that produces food, that's usually top of mind as they want to know what's going on with those assistance programs. And you're saying there was big subsidies provided during as part of the American Rescue Plan, for example, and that lowered measure price? Well, what actually, I think an amplified demand to a degree. Oh, amplified. Oh, demand. Okay. Yeah. And so when you're, when you're going through this year, you're going to start

to lap those programs. So some of your year of your growth rates and sales could be impacted by some of those lower. Lower. They'll be lower. Lower. K2 and Q4. K4. Got it. Yeah, for sure. Yeah. And that's another point about inflation when Ryan says it's going to be 3% at the end of this year, half of more than half of what it is now. Part of that is also just these base effects, so-called base effects, right? Because you're comparing against, well, right now 7% is being compared against December of 2020 when we were in a very different world and businesses were cutting prices in many, many industries. But in December of 2022, we're going to be on the backside of these base effects.

and that will allow inflation to come down as well. Yeah. That's kind of what you're saying. Okay. So, Ryan, back to you, retail sales. That gives a sense of those numbers. They were, well, no, sir. Actually, I should hand it to you, right?

Because we were going back and forth last night, the three of us on email, and Ryan was saying it's going to be down 1.9%. Retail sales are going to be down. Well, there, I see the hand from the clapping hand from Chris. you got it, you nailed it, I think, right? It was down 1.9% the overall retail sales?

Yeah, I was down 1%. Oh, I gave you too much credit. Too much credit. Yeah, well, okay. So give us a sense of that report. You can ignore it. I mean, the decline is, see, Mark hates it when I say ignore things, but it's misleading.

Mac, if you, if you, if you ignore everything Ryan tells you to ignore, I'm not sure I should be paying attention to at this point. I was laughing because you were giving him kudos for hitting it. He did a great job, way better than consensus predicting that number. And then he's like, don't pay attention to that. Oh, yeah. I mean, why I say that is that it's not a correct view of the consumer right now. The consumer is in much better shape than retail sales would otherwise imply.

And the reason is that in December, the seasonal adjustment factors are just brutal. And we pull forward some, you know, spending for the holidays into October and November. So we're getting set up for a dud of a December report. This isn't going to be the norm. I think spending will bounce back in the first quarter, particularly as these over-con variance starts to subside. You're going to see, you know, spending, you know, firm.

I completely agree with what Ryan was just, his evaluation is you do kind of want to throw this seasonly adjusted month-to-month number out. It's not, it'll give you a head fake, if anything. The overall consumer spending environment has been good through the holiday season overall. We did at a front-loaded season this year that pulled some sales forward. But if you look at the spending both data, our retail contacts, you know, everyone would be in harmony saying that it was a good holiday season, if not a very good holiday season. And I'm sure no one, no one's going to use this number, but if you remove the seasonal adjustment, so the non-seasonally adjusted data, so the month-to-month change in December was 10% up.

Positive 10%. Yep. Last December was 12%. In the year before that, it was 10.4%. So we're not noticeably out of line. I think that seasonally adjusted 1.9% decline. Most of it was just these seasonal adjustment factors crushed it. Now, when people talk about holiday season.

sales growth, different ways of defining that. I typically define it as take November and December for retail sales, exclude purchases of cars, exclude purchases of gasoline. And I think most people also exclude restaurant sales because they're not a holiday. And then you look at the year over your growth in that. Do you know what that is, Ryan, off the top of your head, what that number was? don't. I think it was a record number. Record number.

Well into the double digit kind of. It was definitely double digit. Yep. Yeah. Back, do you know that number by any chance? I don't know the exact number that census came out with, but I want it. It was double digits. I want to say like low teens.

Low teens. 13, 14 percent, something like that. And if you look at some of the holiday related sectors, like say clothing, you know, you're looking at, you know, I think census had about 29 percent. Sorry, I'm using numbers that you guys. I don't think I'm stealing any numbers. numbers. No, you're right. No, no. But some of the holiday sectors, if you take like clothing, it was up like 29%. We had it up even higher than that. So depending on how you define your sectors,

you can get very different numbers for how the holiday season performed based on your definition on sectors and time. If you're only, like, I think when we first report in the media, we usually do it right at Christmas so that we'll do a 54-day period from November 1st through December 24. But now that you have full month of December, look at November and December, combine the two, and that'll be a better read for how the holiday season performed. Now, of course, some of that strong growth is inflation, right? So we had 7% consumer price inflation. I suspect for retail goods, which is what mostly is in holiday sales, that could be even higher than that or the inflation. So if I look at kind of real holiday sales growth, meaning after inflation,

It's not double digit, but it's still strong. Three, four, five percent, something like that. Yeah. Yeah, I want to say National Retail Federation said about half of the growth came from inflation. Inflation. In terms of how they're defining it in their estimates. Right. And my sense of it is that if this, you know, even on a real basis,

this may end up being the best. holiday season on record in terms of growth compared to the previous holiday season. In the 20 years I've been 20 years I've been doing it, this would be the highest growth rate season we've ever had. I want to go back. We had a couple of seasons that were normally, they were bouncing off of low bases, though. Yeah. I want to say like maybe 20, 9 or 10.

You know the financial crisis. Yeah, like coming out of the financial crisis and coming out. of the internet kind of bubble. You had a couple of years that got above seven, but we've never had anything above that. And that's an important point because the base effects here are not that significant because the last Christmas sales weren't too bad, actually.

They were okay. They weren't great. They weren't fantastic, but they were kind of typical, as I recall. Low single digits. Yeah, low single digit. We had low single digits, which was shocking, if you had asked us in the spring of 2020, we were expecting Armageddon at that point.

We didn't get it. Right. So bottom line, despite the really bad number for December retail sales, consumers seem to be, they're in the game. They're doing their part, feeling pretty good. And going back to CPI, inflation is up, but the general consensus of the group is we're, if not at the precise peak, we're pretty darn close to it. Yeah. Yeah, pretty darn close to it. Okay.

Okay, very good. Okay, Chris, did you want to add anything to that discussion? I kind of was looking over at Ryan and Mac. Anything you want to add on those numbers? Not really. I think covered it. I agree. Take it with a big grain of salt.

Yeah. Okay. All right, let's play the game. Just to remind the listener, the game is we each have a statistic. The rest of us try to figure out what that statistic is. the best statistic is one that's not too easy that it's a slam dunk for everyone, not too hard that, you know, we, there's no possibility of getting it. It has to be, doesn't have to be, nothing has to be, but we prefer, where certainly Ryan does, that it was in the past week, give or take, came out in the last week. And it would be nice if it were related to the topic at hand, which is the American consumer. But, you know, that, again, that might be too limiting. So, uh, And we traditionally begin with Ryan because he's really pretty good at this game. So Ryan, you want to give us your statistic?

All right. I got three of them for you, all related to the same thing. But there's three numbers, so it's different ways of looking at it. And the last one, I think, is pretty telling. So the first one is minus 3.1%. The second one is positive 12.9%. and then the final one is plus positive 8.4%. Well, I'm guessing this goes to seasonal adjustment,

unseasonally adjusted data. Well, that would be good, but no. Oh, geez. I shouldn't. Ah, I shouldn't. That really, darn. I thought I was being pretty clever there. Wow.

That is a tough one. And it's three different ways of looking at the same thing. Correct. three different ways of looking at the pricing power the willingness or ability of business to raise prices no I'll give you a hint when I bring this number up you hit it

when Chris brings it up you think it's the greatest number ever is that right it's true I'm unaware of that podcast and go back industrial production. It's something really... It's related to the consumer. That's usually the case, though. Related to the consumer.

Wow. I'm sure this is a really good one, and we're going to kick ourselves for not getting it. You should get two of them. The third one, that's really hard. Well, okay, let me... This isn't exactly fair,

but just to see if we can get narrow this down. Related to the retail sales report? Correct. Okay. And there's three different... you're picking off sales for three different types of of products.

That's really the only number I look at in retail sales. Say it again? It's the key number in the retail sales number. Oh, it's a control retail sales. So that's total retail sales excluding autos, gasoline, building materials, and restaurants. And that's what feeds into the BEA,

real economic analysis, estimate of real consumers. I got it. I got it. So it was down 3.1% in December. But again, that's seasonal adjustment factor. It's up 12.9% year over year. And then it is 8.4% higher than its pre-pandemic trend. So if you just extend, you know, what the trend spending was before the pandemic,

I mean, this is, you know, light years ahead of where we were. Yeah, that's a good one. What would I say that I didn't like and I would like for, I didn't like if you said it and Chris, I'd like it if Chris said it. I know, you don't like control retail sales. Oh, I don't like control retail sales. I don't think about Chris. Remember that? What's you talking about?

I don't remember this one. I remember industrial production. Yeah, I remember industrial. Yeah, control retail sales just for the listener, that is what goes, did you say this or am I just repeating it? It goes. It goes into consumer spending that drives GDP. Because the building materials, which is excluded, goes into residential investment, another component. So it doesn't affect consumer spending, which goes into GDP.

By the way, Ryan, with this, I don't know if you run it, but with this release, the retail sales release, what is our tracking estimate for GDP growth in the fourth quarter of this year? excuse me of 2021. Do you know? I haven't run it yet because right after retail, we got industrial production. And then at 10, we got business inventory. So I was just going to run it all at once. Okay.

But we were like between 6 and 7 percent annualized growth in Q4, really strong. Yeah. My gut is going to come down a little bit. Come down because of the retail sales, industrial production, and the inventory data. Yeah. Okay. Which would be closer to our actual forecast for the quarter, which was something like 6-4 or something like that. Okay.

I think, yeah, probably down there. Okay, very good. Those, those, I have to say, those were good. We were, you know, we were bad. We just weren't really good. We should know. That was tough. That was, it was tough numbers.

Oh, yeah, we should have done better than that. Hey, Mac, you want to go next? Are you up for this? Yeah, sure. Yeah, I'll give it a shot. All right. I'll just have one number. I might have to give you some hints because it's kind of could be anything.

In the weeds? In the weeds? Well, it's not too much in the weeds, but it's a number is 6%. 6%. Is it an inflation number? Yes. Okay. Well, you were talking about food prices, but that was up like 6.3% I think year over year.

Is it a component of CPI or is it? No, it's part of CPI. It's a subordinate number that they break out. Okay. Okay. So it's a, is it a highest number? Goods prices, inflation for goods? It's the largest increase since 1982. Is this the CPIX energy? Again, well, you're in the ballpark, but just go down a little bit further. Ex-energy, it would be. It's not the core. It wasn't core. The core was five and a half, wasn't five and a half, yeah. I'll give you a hint

I consumed it last night and it was delicious steak prices very very close it's a food away from home oh food with restaurants yeah restaurants okay

they were up 6% largest increase since 1982 and they had a couple things here that were kind of interesting limited service meals up 8 percent versus a year ago, full service, up 6.6. And then the thing that's kind of messing it up, though, in aggregate is that employee sites and schools were down 49.3 percent because there are so

many free lunch programs going on. Oh, interesting. That is interesting. Yeah. I know why we're not at lunchtime yet, but I guess I have food on my head. Yeah. Of course, when you say the fast his pace of increase since 1982. That applies to almost everything. Everything. That's no big deal. You know? Yeah, you know, that's a, it's very, it's pretty amazing though.

Yeah. All right. Okay, very good. That was good. That was a good one. That was a good. Again, we fell down on the job here. We should have done better with that.

Hey, Chris, you're up. All right. I'll give you a softball. 23.4. Now, this is Mac. Mac, you should know this. He's all about housing for Chris. So just to the hint, it's going to be, unless he's going to give us a head fake this week.

He's got a smile on his face, so I don't know. Okay. 23.4. 23.4%. Year of 4%. Year of year. No. Annualized month to month.

Annualized quarter to quarter. Annualized month month. October to November. Oh, October. Oh, October to November. That's an interesting hit. Are you going consumer credit to November? Yes, I am.

Are you going revolving consumer credit? Yes, revolving. That's what I did. There you go. But he violated a rule that came out. Which one? A week ago. Friday, a week ago.

Friday, 3 p.m. 3 p.m. Oh. That's tricky. Our last podcast came. about before that, right? That's true. No, that's a good point. That's a good point.

So explain, okay, explain to the listener what, what this, we're acting like everyone knows what this is, but no, what they go, what the hell are talking about? Yeah. Tell them what you're talking about. Yeah, it's revolving credit. So credit cards, retail cards, right? Other revolving accounts. It's a Federal Reserve number comes in their G19 release.

It's measuring the change in those balances from the month of October to November. So it was a $20 billion gain, which is significant, large. And then on a percentage basis, 23.4% is also the largest one-month annualized gain since 1998. So consumers are taking out more credit card debt. Certainly the pace of growth is there. However, one caveat is that the level of credit card balances is actually still below what they were prior to the pandemic. So things are growing. consumers are coming back, maybe because of gasoline prices or travel is opening up again.

But the levels of debt aren't quite back up to those pre-pandemic levels. Chris, I'm kind of curious what you think about. It's basically how consumers are funding their purchases going forward. Are they burning down savings and now starting to relever? Is that kind of a hypothesis that you have there? I think it depends on the demographic, right? So you know that excess savings, and I think we'll get, we might get into this later on, their excess savings are up certainly, but those tend to be concentrated in the higher income households.

So I think that higher income group is increasing balances because they're traveling more, they're commuting more or driving more, so they're taking out, they're driving to Florida, so they have to buy more gas, tend to do that on their cars. But then on the other end of the spectrum, you have the lower income, which to your point, I think, are funding their purchases, right? Their savings cushions are actually whittling down here. So they may be accessing that credit in order to fund purchases that they otherwise do. There was that study that the Chicago Fed did.

This is back in 2020. When the stimulus payments were coming out, how long did it take for the consumer to allocate those funds? And I'm going, this is a year and a half ago, so I'm going back in time. But I want to say it was within about four weeks, four to five weeks, they basically had allocated almost all the funds that they had received between savings, paying down bills and actual spending retail sales. And I want to say about 30% of it is what they estimated. They went back into retail immediately. That's what I recall.

Yeah, about a third. Yeah. Yeah. Hey, guys, that's just my dog somewhere in the background. So just ignore. And if he starts losing his mind, I'll let you guys talk and I'll go solve that problem. But I'm on my own. My wife has gone somewhere.

So I apologize for that. Hey, Chris, we, though, get data from Equifax, the Credit Bureau. So we have another month of data. Of course, I'm sure you do too, Mac. You have another month of data. So this Fed data goes through November. What happened in December? Do you happen to look at that?

The December data? Did it show another big increase in credit? In the Equifax data, it did. It did. Okay. Quite substantially, yeah. So I think that continues to point to some of these trends I just mentioned. But, yeah, we're not, again, levels that are back up to pre-pandemic level.

levels, but we're moving in that direction. Yeah, so consumers, households are now going back to their cards in borrowing or using their cards going back to your point about transactions demand. There's more transactions, so there's going to be more that ends up on the card in a given month. But it's coming back fast, but it's still, as of December, it's still below its pre-pandemic level. That's right.

Okay. So debt levels are still. very, very low. Yeah. That's right. That's right. Yeah. But if this trend continues, it won't take long.

It's kind of a return to normal. How long will it take to get there? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, if you look at overall household credit growth, and you can do that with the Equifax data too, the Credit Bureau data, that still feels like I think year over year through December I was looking at through December. It's still five, six percent, right?

So it's a little bit above income, not much above. income. So it's still, you don't know, alarm bells would go off for any of this, right? I mean, it's more of a good thing than a bad thing. I mean, consumers are in the game and they're spending and they're, you know, doing their part. They're driving growth. Yeah, that's the total include mortgage, including mortgage as well, right? Yeah, that is, I include mortgage. Yeah. And we know mortgage has been growing rapidly. So that, you know, that I think mortgage was like 9%. So, yeah, the other part is growing, but it's not, it's not at the alarm bell level quite yet. I would say.

Yeah. Guys, is this dog a real nuisance? Should I go? No. No, you're good? You're all good with this? What's the dog's name? That's Cosmo.

That's Cosmo. Cosmo is 15 years old and it can barely see. So, you know, I don't know what's going on. Did you name the dog after Kramer in Seinfeld? Yeah. Well, my son did. My son did. He's a huge Seinfeld thing.

That's a great name. That's good. Yeah. The other one's George. The other one's Gigi. Gigi. Gigi. I named her G. I game up with that one. Gigi. I like that one. Anyway, I'll take harder for that. Okay, I'm going to give you mine. Ready? Eighty-eight-six. Back to normal index.

I was going to guess the average speed on their way to Florida. Pretty damn close. You're at, yeah, actually, I mean, I was like hovering around 81, 82 the whole way down. Yeah. So I thought because the speed limit 70, I go, okay, 81, 82, I should be pretty right on the edge. It's not worth it to pull you over. Not worth it to pull me over. 88.6. Hey, this is a telling statistic. Well, by the way, back to normal index.

Back to normal index. We're all laughing because that's my go-to index. If I, like I, I don't know what to pick. I pick the back to normal index. And that, we construct it. It's based on government data and third party data, you know, Google Mobility, TSA, number of people go through TSA checkpoints, open table, just a whole range of data and statistics. We do it by at the state level.

And we do it daily. So, and it's back to normal because it's equal to 100 on. On February 29th, 2020, yeah, February 29th, 2020, I just had a brain freezer. February 29th, 2020, right before the pandemic is 100. That's, you know, normal. You know what it felt to today, on Friday today? 88.6. We're going backwards.

We had almost gotten, we were like a 96%. We were now back to 88.6. Now, some of it, you know, again, seasonal adjustment issues, so forth and so on. But, you know, I think that kind of gave you a sense that we're backtracking here a bit. And, you know, it's the biggest, no surprise, the biggest declines are in states that have been nailed by Omicron. So New York, Pennsylvania, Illinois, you know, they're down. It's down across the board. Every state's down, but it's really down in those states.

So, you know, I think the broader point of which we have not talked about yet, is Omicron does feel like it's doing damage, you know, to the economy. You can kind of feel it. Can you see Mac in your data? Can you, because I saw the JP Morgan also puts out their credit card data on a weekly basis. And you could see sales, holiday sales through the first week of December were pretty good. And then they seemed to really come off towards the end of the year, particularly for travel-related spending, restaurants, things you would expect to be affected by the pandemic. Are you observing that in your data as well?

There are a couple of things that when the Omicron spike start to pick up in the second half of December, there were some erosion of some of the growth rates. That was probably also amplified a little bit. It didn't damage the holiday season as much as it could have because retail strategies pulled sales forward and extended the season basically into November. So holiday season was actually pretty good. but we did see some weakness as you got closer to Christmas itself. And then as you're moving through and into January, one other data source that I like to look at besides just the retail spending growth rates are, I like to look at commuting traffic coming into New York as an example.

There's a good MTA there actually does a pretty good job of tracking that. And you're looking at train ridership. it was up back up to around 50% of pre-pandemic levels in the fall. In early January, it slipped back down to about 35% of pre-pandemic levels. Even the bridges and tunnels, which were basically flat with pre-pandemic, are now down about 10% again. So the spike, I think, has pulled down things down to a degree. Nothing like what we saw in spring of 2020, but, but,

It has kind of put a governor on the engine a little bit, I think, on some of the stats that we follow. Yeah. We could also see that in the unemployment insurance claims, right? Initial claims for unemployment insurance came out on Thursday. They rose from below $200,000 per month, which is really, really low, to $230,000, which is still also low, but, you know, that's a big change. And that was unexpected. And, again, if you look at the increasing claims across states, it was in states that had been hit, hardest by Amacron, around New York, Pennsylvania, that kind of thing.

Yeah, from a geographic perspective, really throughout the pandemic, we've seen better numbers in the southern regions. Basically, if you're south and warm, that tended to be good. If you're big and cold, that tended to be bad. And that's pretty much held where, here, I'll just, let me just pull up a quick thing. I can, if you're looking at like some of the top performing. cities, Tampa, Orlando, these are the top 25 markets of the country. So just I say, how do you measure this Mac? What are you measuring exactly? Top 25 is by size of spend. Then I'm ranking them based on

year of year growth. Oh, got it. Okay. So the rankings here in terms of the cities that are showing the hottest year of your growth, Tampa, Orlando, Charlotte, Houston, Miami are ranks 125. If you're looking at the lower end, you're seeing Boston, L.A., Washington, New York, and San Francisco. And that's year over year through the month of December? Or that was, that's for Q4. Oh, for Q4, for Q4. Yeah, fourth quarter of last year. Yeah, fourth quarter of 2021. So, but that story has been pretty consistent where we've seen the larger cities, especially in the north, struggle more. And I think it plays somewhat into that commute those commuting numbers were just talking about how those ecosystems and those cities those

kind of economic ecosystems rely on you know that consumer movement coming in and out and uh when you tap that down the some of those big markets um are feeling it a lot more the secondary markets and uh the markets that don't rely as much maybe on commuting traffic uh seem to be uh holding up a lot better you know in our forecast for the first quarter of 2022 we mark that down So before Omicron hit, so if you go back to early December when we're forecasting, we expected growth in the first quarter of 2022 GDP growth to be just north of 5% annualized. So really another really strong quarter, we've marked that down to 2% growth. And, you know, the case study here is Delta. The Delta variant, that's kind of what Delta did to third quarter 2021 GDP growth.

Kind of shade three, four percentage points annualized off of that growth. So we're using that as a benchmark here. Chris, Ryan, do you think that feels about right in the context of the data we're getting here? Do you think it's going to be stronger, weaker than that? Does that make sense to you? Are we on track? I think so. Again, it's tough to look at this recent data and make much of it.

But, yeah, I think Calamacrines certainly will have an effect. wild car for me one wildcar might be utilities and utility spending and the energy prices and whatnot but we'll have to see what next couple weeks hold yeah the trajectory for spending isn't great right so i'm worried about i'm more i'm worrying if it's going to i guess we're really counting on the the infections that really come off here so january's going to be a washout it's going to be bad we could get employment declines but that you know the infections come off quickly and And so by February, we're more than stabilizing by March, we're back up and running again, full tilt. That would be pretty similar to the spike than South Africa, about two and a half months.

Yeah, right. Right. Was the burnt rate? In the U.K. Very similar pattern in the U.K. Yeah. Yeah, the Europe seems to be, the infections there seem to have, it looks like they've rolled. South Africa, they definitely rolled over.

They're way down. But in the UK and Europe, it feels like we're now past peak. And it feels like U.S. has been behind, particularly the U.K., by three, four, five weeks in terms of infections. And so if that's the case, then I think we're moving in the right direction. A couple of things on the consumer spending front just to keep in the back of mind for when you're walking through. When you're thinking of January, obviously we just talked about the COVID variant, you know, Amacron impacting things. but you're also lapping the $600 stimulus payments from last year that impact in January. In February, you're going to be lapping the Texas freeze that actually should actually lift things a little bit in terms of a comp.

And then in March, you've got two things coming up, the $1,400 payments. Then you're also going to have late Easter. Easter was on the fourth last year. It's on the 17th this year. and that shopping period is about 10 days before the holiday. So some of those Easter sales are going to jump quarters and go from Q1 to Q2. So what's the net of all that? I mean, there's a lot of cross currents there.

That's the thing. It's a lot of noise. In the net, I would actually say what you guys are doing in terms of tempering enthusiasm a little bit on Q1 numbers is probably on the right track. Okay. Okay, great. Good. Okay.

So anything else on the statistics? I know we want to quickly move to the, and we've already done a fair share of this already. Talk about the American consumer. I'll give you one good employment number. Okay. January is bad, but UI benefits, unemployment insurance benefits ticked up, but the insured unemployment rate, which is the number of people that receive unemployment compensation as a percent of the labor force, hit 1.1 percent last week, a record low. Wow. And that tracks the unemployment rate over time.

Not necessarily like, you know, exactly month-to-month-month, but it points towards an unemployment rate, the low rates. I guess we're getting to a place where good now becomes less good, maybe even bad. I mean, remember this dynamic? Yeah, good data is bad because everyone's going to expect the Fed to, you know, slam on the rate. We're saying we're at 3.9% unemployment, which is pretty low, but maybe not full employment. But it's going lower here pretty quickly. So, well, it's just a good thing. We want to get back to full employment, so we shouldn't discount that.

But we are getting there pretty fast, faster than feels like, you know, what I've been counting on. I've been thinking full employment by the end of this year, but you're saying maybe a little faster than that. Maybe the summer. Yeah, wow. Okay. All right. Okay. All right.

Let's talk about the consumer. There's a lot of different things we can talk about. I mean, in the bottom line here, correct me if I'm wrong, Mac, is that American consumer is strong. long in good shape. Okay. So let's just break that down a little bit. I mean, let's talk a little bit about, if you don't mind, so-called excess savings. So this is the idea that people have saved a lot during the pandemic much more than they would have been if there had not been a pandemic. Saving rates have been very high. For some households, particularly lower-in-law income households, that's been related to a lot more government support. We talked about the stimulus checks on employment

insurance, food, food assistance, that kind of thing. And then for higher income households, that is largely related to, I can't travel, I can't go to restaurants, I can't go to ball games, I can't do stuff, therefore I'm going to say. I might buy more things, and that's what we've been doing. We've been buying a lot of stuff, but we haven't been able to spend as much. And so saving rates are up. So the key, one of the key, it's a lot. So if you, you know, if you do the arithmetic, by our calculation, through the month of November, the last data point, there was $2.6 trillion in so-called excess saving, and that's 12, 13% of GDP. That's a lot of, and that's sitting in people's checking accounts,

deposit accounts. Some of us ended up in the stock market, in the crypto market, you know, driven housing purchases, that kind of thing, but a lot of it's still sitting in checking accounts. How do you think about, you know, that kind of that consumer firepower sitting out there? Do you, I mean, if that was all spent, I mean, then we'd blow way past full employment. The fact got a real problem. So how do you think about that? I mean, how much of that's going to be spent? How much of it's, you know, what's your thinking about, you know, exactly how that plays out?

It's kind of building on what Chris was talking about a little bit earlier, where I think you are going to get some very different, some differences depending on your demographic group in terms of income segments where there's a journey that I think we go down where we burned down. the savings rate back to a more normal level, I think was it 6.9 last print, I thought. And what was it like, well, March was crazy. It was like 20 or something in March, but we're gonna be, I think we're on the journey and we're gonna continue that journey as we go forward where the way consumers fund their activity

will continue to burn down savings and then continue to relever and start to fund things through different credit vehicles again. And that's going to take a while. I think to get from here to there, I think it's more than 2022. I think you're getting into 2023, maybe even beyond that, to actually get to a more normal level of savings versus spending. Also, for older demographics, also,

there could be some positive benefits there, because they probably under-saved retirement. And now they were able to catch up a bit. So I think that's probably a good thing there in the long run. So there's some good healthy things, I think, in the long run, regarding how the consumer is today. But in terms of firepower, dry powder, whatever I want to call it, there's plenty to fund consumer demand

as we go through 2022. I think from what we've been told by retailers, consumers have been willing and able to absorb inflation for now. And that seems like I wouldn't say that's different day than it was when I first started hearing it in the summer. And eventually, I think, you know, if inflation remains elevated, it will start to erode purchasing power. Again, probably showing up first at the lower income groups and then moving its way up. But again, that's going to take a while. I think you're basically looking at a strong consumer story for

at least the rest of this year, probably into next. So you, it sounds like you view the excess saving as a real, you know, it's pretty significant plus for the consumer, obviously. I mean, in one obvious, one clear way is it's helped people's retirement nest eggs. So a lot of boomers in their 50, well, now they're in their 60s and 70s, they didn't save enough. But now they have. You know, this really helps. I don't know if they have, but it helped. It definitely helps. Yeah. And of course, stock prices are pretty close to record highs. Housing values are at record highs. People who invested in crypto, like, like Chris, you know, are doing quite well.

You know, so, but that's a positive. Yeah. Behind that door. Yeah. The crypto is sitting back behind that door, by the sitting in front of. And then it's also cushion the blow here, the financial blow from the higher inflation.

So higher inflation hasn't done as much damage to consumer spending as it might have in another world, another time, because you just got a cash cushion sitting out there that you can use. Another thing that I'm going to start looking at a little bit differently is some of the sentiment and confidence figures. I think, did we have sentiment came out this morning,

I think a little bit soft. It was right before. Ryan, I know University of Michigan consumer sentiment came out. I haven't had a chance to look. Did you look at that? I'm looking at it right now. Yeah.

I think it was soft. Yeah. It was. Okay. That's been eroding a bit. in the second half of 2021, but sometimes the way people answer those surveys aren't necessarily the way that they act. It tends to be sensitive to gasoline. It tends to be prices. And there are different variables. Afghanistan, I think, you know, last year, stuff like that that might have

impacted those surveys. So there was a bit of a divergence, I think, between consumers kept spending like they were confident, but they were answering those surveys like their confidence was eroding. As you get into this year, I'm going to pay more attention, though, because I think there's going to be a, those are going to come back together again at some point here, where as people can't afford to absorb the inflation, the way that they have over the past a couple of months, I think that erosion and confidence could end up showing up in behavior. And any, like right now we're talking about how strong the job market is, it's almost there's in order to go up it down, or almost there.

You know, when you start seeing chinks in that, and any kind of a job, you know, sentiment number, I'm going to be looking closely for anything along those lines, too, because I think that could really trigger some behavior changes. Yeah, so what you're saying is so far the higher inflation is not dinged spending, but, you know, over time here, very possibly could. And one way of gauging that is to watch those sentiment measures, if they continue to weaken, that would be an indication that, you know, the higher inflation

is starting to do some damage to spending. Yeah, I think so. And, you know, that's just, it's something that, again, a little bit of a change. Sometimes I like some years, I like certain metrics over others. And that's a metric that I'm going to start to watch more closely. I didn't really think it was that big of a deal last year. But I think it's going to become a bigger deal as we move forward. I start watching one of those markets.

So, you know, when I think of the consumer, I go, okay, I go labor market, job market, you know, do I have a job? What's my pay increase? Check, check, all looks good. I then go to the balance sheet and I say, okay, you know, how much do I, what do I own? You know, I think stocks, I think housing. I think now, you know, crypto is playing a role. You know, we joke about that, but, you know, it's not, it's showing up on the radar screen now. It's on the balance sheet, three trillion in outstanding.

Check, check. I mean, asset prices or stock prices have gone a little fragile here, but they're still pretty close to record highs. And then I think, then I go to the debt side of the balance sheet, you know, leverage. And we talked about that. And while credit growth is accelerating, leverage is low, debt. service portion of income going to servicing debt is pretty close to record lows off bottom, but for technical reasons, but very low. And we talked about excess saving.

It's kind of building assets and deposits and cash. Is there anything out there that makes you worried or nervous? We talked about inflation so far not a big deal. Maybe it becomes a deal if inflation doesn't moderate. But anything else? Anything else that, you know, there are a couple of things. In terms of the consumer,

I'm going to borrow a phrase back from the internet bubble days, you know, back in the late 90s. I don't think it was you. If somebody else on CNBC had said this, that, you know, the beer doesn't get much.

I always do take credit. Yeah, these guys are. So it's definitely mine. Yeah. When things, you just did all that checklist, and you're like,

okay, the beer doesn't get much colder than this. You know, it's, it's a good, It's a good one in terms of where the consumer is right now. They're in a fortified position. They're in a good spot.

That said, there are areas that I am concerned about, but it has to do with how COVID, I'm not going to say Omicron, I'm just going to say COVID more in general, has changed the economy. And we kind of talked about that, touched on it a minute ago, is that there's pretty dramatic change that could have ripple effects, into society in a couple of different ways.

One is the tax revenues for some of these big cities and for some of these big states. They rely a lot on whether it's retail sales, food services, hotels, commercial real estate, a whole bunch of different tax sources. I'm kind of wondering where those are going to go because I don't know if they're going to come back

the way that they were pre-pandemic. So some of the economies and some of the budgets and what they're based on, some of the business models and what they were based on pre-pandemic. I do think there's quite a bit of change that's going to happen there. And you can view that as risk. Sometimes it's opportunity. Sometimes you can view it as a risk, but it is change. And that's one of the things that I'm concerned about there. What are the echoes that kind of all this change does? You know, when you're talking about, as I mentioned, city or state budgets, when you're talking about commercial real estate,

these leases go for 10 or 20 years, but every year you're going to probably have, you know, people wanting and needing a little bit less. So you're focused on the fact that people have left big cities, big urban centers, particularly in the Northeast and on the West Coast, Chicago. And there might be some, there will be some of that coming back as we get on the other side of the pandemic and offices reopened. but there's no going back. We're not going to see, we're going to still see people on net continue to leave these big areas in a significant way. And I'm going to, I'm just kind of paraphrasing and asking if I got it right. And you're saying that, you know, that has all kinds of, as you said, ripple effects and implications on the New York City's budget on office towers in San Francisco, on the, detailing that services all the office workers in Chicago, you know, what happens as a result of it?

That's what you're saying here? Yeah. So it's like when you're asking me, what am I concerned about? Yeah. It's like, you go down the consumer checklist and you're like, okay, this is. No problem. Yeah. This is pretty good over here. Yeah.

So if I'm thinking about things that I'm concerned about, I'm thinking a little bit more broadly and I'm thinking about those sources of change, you know, in terms of and the economic ripple effects that they might have would be the areas that I'm probably more concerned about today than I am about the U.S. consumer. Got it. Now, of course, those folks are going somewhere, right? As you pointed out in your data, you're spending pulse data. There's opportunity.

Tampa, Atlanta, Charlotte, you know, you didn't mention Texas, but I assume Texas. I think Houston's six. Yeah. He's number six. Okay, there you go. So, and from a broad U.S. macroeconomic perspective, maybe there's a lot of cross-current. And so, you know, maybe the losers pull back more than the winners pull forward and you get some net negative effect. But in a macro sense, it's not that big.

Is it a big deal? That's what I'm kind of saying is that there's change which can be scary in some areas, but it can also be opportunities and others. Like even within the big cities, you know, there are opportunities around the cities that didn't exist before in terms of migration. And then there are bigger migrations like you're talking about in terms of people actually moving states, you know, and the migration south. You know, that's kind of a more of a bigger macro thing. So there are lots of ripples and repercussions that could, you know, impact a lot of areas of the economy that are based on COVID. That, you know, I think we'll start to get line aside on as we get through these variants and we start things start to calm down. and things start to, you know, migrate back to normal.

There's going to be this new set of post-COVID issues that we're going to have to start to deal with. Yeah, I agree with you. Here's some data for you. We get a 10% sample of all the credit files on the country at a consumer level every month from Credit Bureau Equifax. It's anonymized so we don't know who the folks are, but we know their address. So we can see address changes.

in the 12 months through February of 2020, obviously the year ahead of the pandemic, I'm, you know, I'm rounding. So, you know, roughly these are the numbers. Not quite 300,000 more people left urban centers for suburbs and excerpts that came into those urban centers. So even before the pandemic, you know, these big urban cores were losing people on net to suburbs and excerpts. Yeah. And we have a definition for urban based on population density and that kind of thing. And as of June of last year, and this is the peak, close to 600, actually a little over 600,000 net left urban course for suburban. So it was a doubling, more than a doubling. That's come back in a little bit. We've got, we just got data for December. We're now down to 560,000. So it's, you know, people are starting. to come back, but they're not, you know, we're way, way, way, it's way different than it was pre-pandemic. And I expect that to come in further as offices, you know, ultimately reopen. I don't know about MasterCard, but Moody still is virtual. You know, people haven't gone back into the office.

Yeah, I think a lot of offices are going to kind of settle in around that two to three days a week, you know. Kind of hybrid thing. Hybrid kind of thing. But even if you get that, you're still talking about 40% fewer trips, you know, what does that do to MTA budgets? What does that do to, you know, the business models that for the restaurants and for the small businesses that were really relied on that mobility and that traffic coming in and out? Yeah. You know, I think there have been some band-aids that have kind of bridges that have kind of helped some folks, but in the long run, you're going to have to figure out a new business model based on potentially 30, 40% less traffic. Right, right. Chris Ryan, anything you want to weigh?

in on with regard to this? I mean, this sort of fits with my kind of thinking around this as well and the work we've done. But any views on this, a particular issue? I generally agree, right? Consumers are in good shape today. And COVID is certainly going to change some of the trends and outlook. One thing I think about, though, or I'd caution against getting overly excited about it when

it comes to the excess savings are some changes in attitudes, right? So I do think there will be more precautionary saving going forward. If there are future pandemic waves, and we all know about it, we adjust to it, but that would suggest people should be, you know, saving up in anticipation of, you know, job losses or delays or whatnot. And just scarring in general, right? These is pretty dramatic event we've all been living through. And certainly I think that will cause some of the, particularly the younger generation,

to be a little bit more cautious going forward. That would be my assumption. Yeah, it makes sense. You know, who knows, right? American consumers seem pretty resilient. So, again, 2.6 trillion sounds like a big number, but I don't expect all of that to, you know, come flying back anytime soon. I think that the savings rate is going to actually remain high for a while.

Yep. Right. Ryan, anything you want to add? No, I agree with everything. Oh, that's a first. Okay. All right. Very good.

Asking in the glow of his getting it more right today. We've got to the yield curve. Yeah, exactly. Well, I think we've come to the kind of a good ending point for the podcast. Is there anything that I'm – Oh, I guess maybe a last open question I should have asked on the spending post data. Is there anything else in the data that you're observing that, you know, you find – You just want to call out and say, hey, this is interesting.

I was going to end on a nice note. Okay, good. I'm all for that. Positive note. So if you look at last year, jewelry sales were up about 63.8% year over year. And our economics crew here did some work. They estimated that about a million weddings were postponed or delayed due to COVID. So there's this huge backlog of weddings.

That is blowing up. the jewelry numbers and event apparel and all this kind of stuff that we're just seeing absolutely explode. So I expect weddings in 2022 and lots of babies in 2022, 2022, 2023, 2020. Well, that's, bring that on. We need it, right? Birth rates have been low, death rates have been high, immigration's been. We need folks. So that's good. That's a, that's a, I really like that. So a million, a million weddings.

And pent up weddings. I might be getting this wrong. I think, did they say that there are three million weddings a year or something like that? And about a million of them were delayed. I could be getting that wrong, but it was something in that ballpark. Well, that's a wonderful statistic. That's a great one to end on a very positive note. I want to thank you, Mac, for joining us today.

Really a pleasure. And to the listener at Ryan, I didn't even waiting for this. At Mark Zandi. There we go. There's my Twitter handle. Hey, Mac, are you on Twitter? I am not, but I'm getting heat from some of your guys saying I should be. So I got to get on.

There you go. And Ryan keeps threatening. He's going to tell us what his handle is. But Ryan, is this the week? I forgot what it was. Oh, wait. I got it. No, I got it.

Okay. Real time underscore econ. That's your Twitter handle. That's pretty good. Say that again. At real time underscore econ. Econ. I love that.

Yeah, very good. Okay. And I know, Chris, you have a handle too, right? I do, but I never check it. You never check it. Okay. All right. Well, very good. Thanks so much. And until next week, talk to you soon. Take care now. Bye-bye.