Stil no signs of weakness from the US consumer

I don’t think there is any reasonable basis to believe that the US consumer is going to stop spending any time soon. Yes, measures of consumer confidence are in the dumpster but those surveys — for whatever reason — are proving to be worthless in the 2020s.

Below are four snippets from recent executive commentary. Taken together they paint a remarkably united picture: the US consumer is still spending and the macro backdrop remains sturdier than almost anyone thought a few months ago, save for some small pockets like lodging.

Goldman Sachs COO John Waldron

“The U.S. economy and the U.S. consumer is showing tremendous resilience. Somewhat surprising to me, but I think you have to say the resilience in the economy is pretty pronounced. We still have a significant fiscal impulse. We still have very strong employment. We’re moving, as we said, towards more manageable tariff levels. I think that all likely leads to economic growth. I think we’re likely to avoid a recession with this baseline set of facts, but the volatility remains, and so it’s still a little bit uncertain.”

Mastercard CEO Michael Miebach

“Last time that we all spoke was at our earnings call, we had the first-quarter data, and we had up until the 28th of April, and spending trends were stable at the time. Now if you include the first 3 weeks of May, we see exactly the same. So spending trends have largely been the same. Now if you look at this a little bit closer, and then you’d say, why is that? If you look at the headlines, if you look at the sentiment surveys, and we’ve just seen one yesterday, I was surprisingly positive. So, you see a lot of rhetoric there and you see a lot of headlines and it hasn’t really translated into consumer behavior.”

American Express CEO Steve Squeri

“It’s been consistent, right? It’s really been consistent. What we’ve seen through May is what we saw through April and what we saw in March and in the first quarter. And so, goods and services consistent. Airline pretty consistent and we said that was down a little bit. I think lodging gets a little more challenged, but restaurants still very, very strong. And if you look at the individual segments — international, SME and U.S. consumer — pretty consistent to where they are. So, unless something crazy happens in June, I think when we start talking about this in July, we’re going to say the second quarter pretty much looked just like the first quarter did, FX-adjusted and all that other kind of stuff.”

Visa CFO Christopher Suh

“Payments-volume data primarily has remained in line with what we’re seeing in April, what we saw in the month of April, which means for the quarter it’s actually tracking a little bit better than Q2, again reflecting the resilience in consumer. So that’s the U.S.”

Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan

“When you look at it in the aggregate, about $1.7 trillion has moved from our consumer accounts into the economy year-to-date through May 15th or so. That’s up about 6 % from last year. That’s a faster rate of growth than the fourth quarter of last year and the fourth quarter of the prior year. So it’s accelerating during the year. And, you know, it’s not people getting ahead of the tariffs — this is going all over the economy. And that’s because people are in relatively good shape… The answer is: the consumers are spending money. That means the US economy has an anchor to windward that very few economies have, because that huge consumer base spends. And our customer base supports that across the board.”

That’s a remarkably consistent view from people with access to the best consumer data. That could change but I don’t think it will until there is some real government austerity or job losses.