Shop 'til You are Under Water

I saw it coming and there was not a thing that I could do. I was moving one of the chairs at my Lenox Square Starbucks table to another for a family that needed it. A woman carrying a dozen or so shopping bags was rushing through the mall, those bags extending four feet out from her hip. They swept my freshly made macchiato off of my table like a chip-shot field goal. I saw it fly and hit the ground where it landed upright at first, the top popped off and through some internal liquid momentum it tipped over gently pouring onto the floor. Newton was right about some things. The shopper never noticed. She was long gone.

I had come to the mall to get ready for a story on holiday shopping. All morning I had wondered where these people were getting the money to shop. In this economy, with so many struggling under lower income and reduced assets, there can't be that much money out there. Are they all just increasing their personal debt?

I got out my laptop, went to the Federal Reserve's website and looked through the stats. I aced graduate economics, but that was a long time ago and I am by no means an expert. What I found was that the skyrocketing unsecured debt, basically credit card debt, of the past few years has actually eased somewhat, from just under one-trillion dollars to just over 800-billion. My next question was how much of that reduction has been from write-offs by the lenders, “charge-offs” in economic terms, those loans which will just not be collected so they are closed out by the lender. It appeared from what I could see that the charge-off percentages had gone up as the amount of unsecured debt, revolving credit, had eased, then they backed off a little too. Charge off rates had gone from a few percent to more than ten before coming back down a bit.

Seemed simple to me, but as I learned when I studied this stuff so many years ago, the more data sources that you include, the more accurate your answer will be. My head was hurting from looking at the numbers so I decided to give a shout to my friend and one of the foremost economists in the world, very much an unsung woman in the field, Atlanta's Sheila Tschinkel. I dropped by one afternoon this week and found her fishing out leaves that had fallen into her fountain in the front yard of her midtown Atlanta home. Sheila had recently taken a fall and injured her right arm, so she was netting the leaves with one hand, “It's okay, I am actually left handed,” she said.

We caught up on the latest happenings in our respective lives and then sat at her dining table to talk about holiday shopping. The result is that I learned context is everything and no one in the media is talking about the real story behind our current economic situation, that in which all these shoppers are scrambling for their desires.

“The numbers look a little brighter, not sunny, but brighter,” Tschinkel explained. “The polls indicate that they are spending more than last year, but not gangbusters, just more, and that is logical because actually the economy is not shrinking, it's growing and you would expect sales to be higher than last year, if the economy is growing in the aggregate. Also, luxury sales are trending quite a bit higher and that is consistent with high end business being back to normal.”

One interesting trend in this holiday shopping period is a sign that people are personally starting to feel the recovery, “The early reports this year say that relatively more of the shopping has been people buying for themselves, maybe it's, 'I have been working so hard I owe myself a little something instead of buying something for someone else.' We all do that, you know.” Yes I do!

But this downturn is far from ending and it is not just over the past couple of years. Our crisis has been long coming in terms of consumer spending and that's the part that I am not hearing in the media. Tschinkel is quick to point out that for the past thirty years, income distribution has been changing with the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer. From World War II until 1980 there was a leveling of income. But with the advent of political philosophies of the 80s, those numbers did an about-face, with the poor becoming increasingly poor and the middle class hollowed out. For almost twenty years that trend continued. “That's when it seemed perfectly alright not just to lenders, the banks and others, but also to Congress to encourage this housing boom, as if almost to compensate the poor, to push them into houses that they couldn’t afford. Even if you had not had the predatory lending, etc., the push by the Congress, which now of course acts like it had nothing to do with this, to get Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to make more loans available, to keep the pump going was sort of a political reaction to the fact that otherwise these people couldn’t afford to buy anything. That didn’t happen in the nineties really but about the turn of the century you had this housing boom and then of course what made it worse was a philosophy of deregulation because there was nobody policing the predatory lenders.”

As if that wasn't enough, these bad loans could be sold off so that the originators did not experience the losses when mortgages turned out uncollectible. Sellers, perhaps the originators or salesmen of the bad mortgages, received the full commission on the life of the loan, up front. That situation pushed lenders to look for any credits and even into outright fraud. Note that the issue of the commissions is a bit different than the issue of selling the loan. They need to be separated.”

“So, now you couple that with trends in income distribution it has made the situation harder from which to recover.”

Holiday shopping numbers pale in importance compared to employment and income, in terms of recovery. Shopping can be up while the job scene is flat. Besides, there are factors involved in the job market that belie the jobless figures that we hear from the media. For instance, unemployment might be at about 9.8-percent, but that is just on the surface. There are also the underemployed and those who have dropped out of the job hunt. But Tschinkel points to yet other factors that influence spending, “People who are employed become afraid of losing their jobs and they therefore tend to save a little bit more than if you have four-percent unemployment, five percent unemployment. They're not as likely to spend the money that they are making.”

If you notice more women than men doing the buying this holiday season there is a good reason for that. “For the first time the unemployment rate has gone up for more men than for women. Women have more job flexibility, after years of needing to have more job flexibility; they drop out of the work place for a period if they can’t hire people to take care of kids. They’re more likely to be single parents and they have had to change jobs. To some extent this recession has been different for women. In many cases women are more relied on and there are some psychological reasons when you have the two parent situation and you suddenly have house daddies who are not used to being house daddies.” (That would account for the guys helping me with napkins when I was mopping up the macchiato.)

Another trend that might encourage some to buy these days is that the fears of deflation are subsiding and more people are expecting some inflation in the coming months. “One of the things that was dragging the economy was the feeling that there was possible deflation out there and if I am a consumer and I look at possible deflation then I am in no hurry to get that TV, or chair. Now, if I think the price will be flat to higher then I’m going to run out and get that chair. So, you could see people acting on that which I view as rational if they believe it I mean. But, you certainly don’t want to say to people make a bet on it, go into debt and bet on inflation.”

I'll have to wait for the numbers to come out for November, December and January to see whether holiday buying increases reflect growth in income, more confidence in the economy, relief about deflation or if people are merely increasing that crippling personal debt on their credit cards, betting on the near future.

In the meantime, I'm digging out two-dollars in coins to get another macchiato.