US | Here comes record-breaking consumer spending growth
Spend, save, and pay down debt – that’s exactly what US consumers did in early 2021. This supported a 14ppts jump in the personal savings rate to 27.6% – its second-highest reading ever after April 2020 – and boosted households’ excess savings to $2.3tn. The strong US consumer showing at the end of Q1 sets the tone for a summer boom.
What you will learn from this report:
- We foresee real consumption growth at 9.6% this year – the strongest performance since 1946.
- We expect US households will use about 13% of the $2.3tn in excess savings accumulated since the pandemic’s onset to smooth their outlays, supporting 5.1% consumer spending growth.
- Should consumers spend 45% of their excess savings over the next 18 months, in line with the marginal propensity to spend out of income, real GDP could be 2.5% higher than in our baseline in 2022.
Tags:
Related Services

Post
Firms must brace for higher ‘new normal’ construction material prices
New research by Oxford Economics suggests that construction materials prices have shifted permanently higher due to the shocks of the past couple of years. Project managers and investors should anticipate costs being at least 15-20% higher in 2024 and onwards than in 2021.
Find Out More
Post
New Activity Trackers suggest momentum is waning
After a choppy first quarter of GDP data, our novel Activity Trackers (which incorporate proprietary daily sentiment data from Penta) suggest that economic momentum in EM Asia is on a softer trend in Q2 (at least outside of China) supporting our view of easing underlying inflationary pressures and diminishing appetite for further rate hikes.
Find Out More