Dear Reader,
Let's talk about excess savings.
It's a roughly $2.5 trillion financial war chest representing a massive tailwind for the economy.
Excess savings represent the extra money consumers have put away since the pandemic, thanks to limited spending options, government financial support, and a run-up in home values and stock prices.
This extra cash has enabled consumers to spend at a growing rate amid decades-high inflation. And importantly, all income demographics have seen gains.
This has generally been good news, especially for investors in companies that have successfully passed higher costs onto customers in the form of higher prices.
However, these savings are also exacerbating two of the biggest challenges in the economy.
The Labor Shortage
There aren't enough workers to fill more than 11 million open jobs in the economy.
Why?
Because excess savings enable individuals and households to get by on a little less income.
Two, excess savings.
Excess savings have helped customers pay up for higher prices.
Businesses know this, so they're taking advantage of it to bolster their profit margins. If customers couldn't pay up, then raising prices would be much riskier, as it could cause demand to tumble.
But that's not happening.
You could argue that excess savings represent a curse in the current inflationary environment because high prices have failed to slow demand.
To be clear, this is a high-quality problem. Of course, inflation from an economic boom is a far better alternative than deflation from an economy unable to recover.
From an investor's perspective, stocks have proven to be a decent inflation hedge — so far — as companies have been effective at growing profits in this rising cost environment.
Further down the road, it remains to be seen if the Fed's efforts to fight inflation or something else pushes the economy into a recession, which historically isn't great for stocks in the short term.
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