Tuesday, April 16, 2013

Wells Fargo economist expects 2Q consumer spending to slow

Wells Fargo's chief economist said he expects a slowdown in consumer spending in the second quarter, despite a pickup in the first quarter.

John Silvia said inflation, higher taxes and economic uncertainty are contributing to sluggish wage gains, particularly for low- and middle-income people.

"That's that underlying fundamental that really says that the trend in consumer spending is just not as strong as the first quarter," Silvia said.

Silvia made the comments in a video Wells Fargo published on YouTube Monday.

Silvia also said he isn't expecting major job gains in the coming months. Rather, job growth might be on par with that of the past couple of years, with 160,000 to 180,000 jobs added per month, he said. The added jobs will primarily be in the service, construction and manufacturing sectors, he said.

"When you look at who's getting the jobs, it's primarily younger workers who have computer skills and college education," he said. "What our society does not produce is the old, traditional, low-skilled, semiskilled manufacturing jobs."




1 comments:

Skippy said...

Higher taxes? Can anyone help me out with this one? Anyone? Economic uncertainty. Anyone, anyone? And how about the service sector jobs kids, you know the ones that are being cut back to 30 hours a week because of Obamacare. Do you mean those jobs?

Excellent choice voting him back in for four more years, that's a bunch more rounds of golf on our dime.

Obamacare doing what it was designed to do, destroy this country:

by John Nolte

Monday, Regal Entertainment Group, the largest movie theatre chain in the country, announced that thousands of employees will have their work hours cut -- as a direct result of the added cost of the new ObamaCare mandates that become effective later this year.

In a memo to employees, management was blunt: “To comply with the Affordable Care Act, Regal had to increase our health care budget to cover those newly deemed eligible based on the law's definition of a full-time employee.”