Consumer spending has been pretty steady all year

The federal budget passed today. It's cold back East. There's nothing new on the SBF or Twitter fronts. Donald Trump remains guilty of inciting an insurrection to keep himself in power even though he lost the 2020 election. Meh.

So here's a couple of additional charts that show consumer spending through November. First up is services vs. durable goods:

Purchases of durable goods have gone through big swings since the start of the pandemic, and the trendline decline this year is mostly an artifact of huge growth in January. Take that one month away and the trend is actually up. The much larger services sector is less volatile but has been declining a bit all year.

Here is overall personal expenditure growth:

It's been running at about 2.4% since mid-2021, almost identical to the 2.5% growth rate before the pandemic. As you can see, the November figure was very low but appears to be mostly noise. Generally speaking, consumer spending has stayed pretty steady so far even as wages have dropped and savings have been used up.