2025-04-02
9 分钟Welcome to Thoughts on the Market.
I'm Arunama Sinha from Morgan Stanley's Global and U.S. Economics team.
It's been almost three months since President Trump took office,
and today we want to take the pulse of the U.S. consumer.
It's Tuesday, April 1st, at 10 a.m. in New York.
We recently lowered our forecasts for nominal consumption spending in 2025 and 26 on the back of increased policy uncertainty,
and we now see bigger downside risks to consumption.
To understand what's happening, I'm joined by my colleagues, James Egan,
Morgan Stanley's co-head of U.S. Securitized Products Research and Heather Berger from the U.S. Economics team.
Heather, I want to come to you first.
Could you walk us through our view for the year in the context of where consumption spending is now?
What we've seen is that through the end of last year, consumer spending growth actually held up pretty well.
We saw that nominal and real spending growth both outpaced the pre-COVID averages in 2024,
and there was actually strength into the end of the year as well.
So far this year, we have seen that there has been more weakness in terms of consumer sentiment,
as well as some of the spending data has been a bit weaker, a bit sooner than expected.
What's really been supporting consumers in supported spending last year has been continued growth in labor income,
as well as significant accumulation of wealth, which has really supported high-income consumers.
Heading into this year, we did expect that consumer spending growth would slow,
largely because of the impacts of tariffs and immigration,